GMBS: A new middleware service for making grids interoperable

Grid resource management has been a highly studied research field since Grids were born. Though well-designed, evaluated and widely used resource brokers and meta-schedulers have been developed, new capabilities are still required, while the major demand is for interoperability support. Most of the existing brokering solutions can hardly cross the borders of current middleware systems that are lacking the support of these requirements. In this paper we (i) investigate the current resource management solutions from the lowest to the highest level of the Grid middleware, (ii) examine and compare their connections by presenting an anatomy that helps users to grasp the basics of their operation and the researchers to identify common components and open issues. Then we (iii) introduce meta-brokering, which enables higher level resource management by utilizing existing Grid brokers, and provide an implementation of this solution, the Grid Meta-Broker Service, which is a new interoperable grid middleware service for interconnecting Grid islands to compose a World Wide Grid, where users and portals can transparently utilize a growing number of Grids in the future. Finally we (iv) evaluate the presented solution in a simulated Grid environment using real workloads.