Do not use this page, it has been migrated to the ARCS WIKI at http://wiki.arcs.org.au/bin/view/Main/ResourceDiscovery

APAC Grid Resource Discovery

Purpose - To allow Grid Applications to determine where particular resources can be accessed and to monitor the status of the resources.

Responsible Group - SAPAC

Group Members

• Gerson Galang, SAPAC (team leader)
• Darran Carrey, iVEC
• Ronald Jones, iVEC
• Andrew Sharpe, JCU
• Paul Coddington, SAPAC
• Ben Evans, ANU

Application Support Contact

• Ryan Fraser, CSIRO, Geosciences
• Terry Rankine, iVEC
• Daniel Cox, SAPAC

Contact

• Gerson Galang - gerson.galang@adelaide.edu.au - 08 8303 3185
• Paul Coddington - paul.coddington@adelaide.edu.au - 08 83038262 or 08 0303 4949

Resource Information, Registry and Monitoring Services

The APAC National Grid is currently providing the services below through Globus' Monitoring and Discovery Service

• Registry services to enable discovery of what software or services are available on the grid resources.

• Resource information services to en# see twiki page for further details on this sectionable users, resource brokers and applications to find out the status of grid resources, e.g. CPU architecture and CPU load, available memory, disk space and disk usage, OS, resource manager queue information, and network bandwidth.

An overview of the proposed approach for the NG is given below. The hyperlinks on this page will give more detailed information about each service and how they were implemented on the NG.

The issue of metadata catalogs will be addressed elsewhere, since these are often application specific. However the registry of services on the APAC grid should allow discovery of metadata catalog services.

Comments are welcome, particularly on whether this is feasible to implement on partner sites, and whether it meets the needs of application projects.

Background Information

Resource Information Services

Resource information services on grids are typically provided by the Globus Monitoring and Discovery System (MDS)and related applications.

VDT1.4 provides MDS2 and MDS4. MDS2 is is based on LDAP. MDS2 will be used for NGv1 while MDS4 is a set of WSRF services. MDS4 (and MDS2 for backwards compatibility) will be used for NG2.

The MDS uses a hierarchical approach to providing resource information. A Grid Resource Information Service (GRIS) is set up for each NG1 Virtual Machine. GRISes running on the NG1 VMs will be indexed by the APAC Grid Information Index Service (GIIS) running on VPAC's NG1 VM. SAPAC will be running a secondary APAC GIIS for fault tolerance purposes. QCIF will be the only site running a GIIS because it has a number of sites which also run gateway machines. QCIF members sites will configure their GRISes to publish information to the QCIF GIIS.

By default MDS2 and MDS4 publishes resource information using their own standard schema for the fields and its own resource information provider program for obtaining the information and loading it into the MDS.

MDS has a way of publishing data about the cluster's compute nodes and this is by using the GLUE schema. The GLUE schema is used by EGEE, LCG, Grid3/OSG, Globus and NorduGrid? . The Virtual Data Toolkit which is the middleware that we are using on the APAC Grid also uses the GLUE schema as the default schema for MDS.

Registry Services

The MDS using the GLUE 1.2 schema can be used as a software registry but it only offers a limited number of software attributes -- name, version, and path. The APAC Grid has decided to extend the GLUE schema and asked the GLUE schema authors to consider some of the fields that have been specified in the extensions document. You can go to the APACGlueExtensions page if you want to know more about the fields that were added to the extensions document to support software packages.

Web services typically use a registry service such as UDDI. Another possibility is the Resource Information Manager (ebRIM) within ebXML, which is an OASIS standard aimed at electronic business. The advantage of UDDI is that it is a widely used W3C? standard, whereas the advantage of ebRIM is that it can do everything UDDI can do and more, including act as a metadata catalog.

Our approach for the APAC NG is to use MDS2 for non-WS Globus applications and MDS4 for applications using GT4.

User Requirements

Why do we need Information Services? NCRISInformationServicesRequirements
The AdditionalFieldsForTheAPACSoftwareMap twiki page lists the additional fields we need from the APAC Software Map.

Implementation

Install/Config Docs

APAC Information Service Provider

The service provider uses MDS, MIP, APAC MIP Module, and a custom written software information provider (SIP) to provide information about your site.

The philosophy of adopt and adapt has been used to merge three packages, MDS, MIP and SIP together. This has the advantage of not reinventing the wheel, but Unfortunately it means there are three independent configuration systems. It is not possible to change this without significant work.

The installation process has been divided in 4 steps :

1. InstallAPACInfoServiceProvider - Install MIP with the default configuration
2. ConfigureAPACInfoServiceProvider - Configure MIP to your site
3. ConfigureAPACSoftwareInfoProvider - Configure the software information provider to your site
4. IntegrateAPACInfoServiceProvider - Integrate MIP with Globus/MDS
5. Check the output of your MDS4 service
6. Make your MDS setup secure

How to Use the APAC Information Service

• UsingMDSFour

Technical Reports/Papers

• Experiences in Deploying an MDS4 Grid Information System on the Australian National Grid - This paper has been accepted for presentation at the APAC 07 Conference.

Meeting Minutes

Do not use this page, it has been migrated to the ARCS WIKI at http://wiki.arcs.org.au/bin/view/Main/ResourceDiscovery