Time and space adaptation for computational grids with the ATOP-Grid middleware

Adaptive resource allocation is becoming an important feature for local applications and for grid applications that run simultaneously on multiple sites. The applications may face varying resource availability during execution, may need to schedule around obstacles as from reservation, and may have to deal with varying system load under time-shared execution and with a lack of accurate runtime predictability on heterogeneous resources. Thus, middleware support is needed to make the applications adaptable. We present our ATOP-Grid middleware which employs the well-known Zoltan/ParMETIS library for high-quality workload adaptation, enhanced with an over-partitioning extension. ATOP-Grid constitutes a unified approach for application-internal workload self-adaptation under different resource-sharing types, integration with the local batch job schedulers, and largely autonomous decision making.