Metascheduling - Free study compiled by field experts, GridwiseTech

GridwiseTech – the Grid computing and consulting company has just completed an intense process of testing a variety of metascheduling products.

Krakow, Mar. 20, 2006 - Specializing in Grid technology means constantly developing and enhancing expertise for the benefit of customers. For the last three years GridwiseTech has been finding solutions focused on integrating technologies and providing market readiness to existing technologies for many businesses in Europe and the US. The vendor-independent company GridwiseTech understands the need for providing its clients with the most up to date advice and solutions and has just completed a fully unbiased evaluation of metaschedulers currently available on the market.

Metascheduling also popularly known as brokering is an important piece in a typical computational Grid. A metascheduler is the vital part responsible for the load balancing work between sites and data centers. Metascheduling is a technology in the Grid that is responsible for managing jobs and application workflow, including submitting, scheduling, executing, monitoring, stopping, and retrieving results of computational jobs.

Metaschedulers are helpful in assisting business professionals in their daily activities. Managers want to find single entry points to their computer resources, and brokers assist them here by facilitating access to the resources they need.

Metascheduling solutions can be divided into academic (released as Open Source and supported by community ) and commercial solutions. The report focuses on the following criteria with regard to choosing the best product:

• Interoperabililty
• Scalability
• Cost
• Administrator and programmer interfaces
• Technical features, such as advanced reservation capability

The solutions that follow were evaluated by the GridwiseTech Team.

CSF & Platform CSF Plus - The Community Scheduler Framework (CSF) is an open source framework for implementing a grid metascheduler, with the use of the Globus Toolkit middleware. CSF was developed by Platform Computing in cooperation with the Jilin University, China.

Grid Service Broker - Grid Service Broker is a metascheduler developed in the Grid Computing and Distributed Systems Laboratory at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

GridWay - GridWay is a lightweight metascheduler developed by a team working for Distributed Architecture Group from Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Spain.

Moab Grid Scheduler (aka Silver) - Moab Grid Scheduler is a feature-abundant metascheduler developed by Cluster Resources Inc.

EGEE Workload Manager Service (WMS) - Workload Manager is being developed as a part of the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) project funded by the European Commission.

Nimrod/G & Axceleon EnFuzion – Nimrod, developed at the Monach University, is a specialized modeling system that uses simple declarative language to express parametric experiments.

MP Synergy - MP Synergy, a product of United Devices, is designed for virtualized management of the entire enterprise infrastructure.

Condor-G - Condor-G is not a full-featured broker, it is a fault-tolerant job submission system that can access various computing resources, and scheduling has to be implemented above Condor-G.

To read the results of this thorough research go to metaschedulers

‘As the infrastructure virtualization market is getting complex, our customers were confused as to how various Grid products relate to each other. In response, we decided to make part of our internal market research open to the public. As a vendor-independent professional services company, also active in the Global Grid Forum, we offer guidance in understanding business values and choosing among the available solutions. This effort is reflected in our regular tutorial ‘Grid Primer for Managers’, as well as the report on metaschedulers we are publishing at this moment,’ remarked GridwiseTech’s President, Pawel Plaszczak. Plaszczak holds a tutorial titled Grid Primer for Managers at the Global Grid Forum. He is also the author of the book “Grid Computing: The Savvy Manager’s Guide” .

Vendors interested in adding or updating information on their product should write to GridwiseTech at contact@gridwisetech.com.