Proposal for Technical

In this work, we demonstrate the power of providing a common set of operating system services to Grid Archi-tectures, including high-performance I/O, communication, resource management and process management. AGrid[1] enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed resourcesincluding supercomputers, storage systems, data sources, and specialized devices owned by different organiza-tions administered with different policies. In the last few years, a number of exciting projects like Globus[2],Legion[3], and UNICORE[4] developed the software infrastructure needed for grid computing. However, op-erating system support for grid computing is minimal or non-existent. Tool writers are forced to re-invent thewheel by implementing from scratch. This is error prone and often results in sub-optimal solutions. To addressthese problems, we are developing GridOS, a set of operating system services that facilitate grid computing. Theservices are designed to make writing middleware easier and make a normal commodity operating system likeLinux highly suitable for grid computing. The modules are designed to be policy neutral, exploit commonality invarious grid infrastructures and provide high-performance. Experiments with GridOS verify that there is dramaticimprovement in performance when compared to the existing grid file transfer protocols like GridFTP[5]. Ourproof-of-concept middleware shows that writing middleware is easy using GridOS. References[1] I. Foster and C. Kesselman, Eds., The Grid: Blueprint for a Future Computing Infrastructure. MorganKaufmann Publishers, 1999.[2] I. Foster and C. Kesselman, “Globus: A meta-computing infrastructure toolkit,” The International Journal ofSupercomputer Applications and High Performance Computing, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 115–128, 1997.[3] A. S. Grimshaw, W. A. Wulf, and the Legion team, “The legion vision of a worldwide virtual computer,”Communications of the ACM, vol. 40, no. 1, pp. 39–45, Jan. 1997.[4] V. Huber, “UNICORE: A Grid computing environment for distributed and parallel computing,” Lecture Notesin Computer Science, vol. 2127, pp. 258–266, 2001.[5] B. Allcock, J. Bester, J. Bresnahan, A. L. Chervenak, I. Foster, C. Kesselman, S. Meder, V. Nefedova, D. Ques-nel, and S. Tuecke, “Data management and transfer in high-performance computational grid environments,”Parallel Computing, vol. 28, no. 5, pp. 749–771, May 2002.