GridAustralia 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
• Paul Coddington, SAPAC
• Ben Evans, ANU

Application Support Contact

• Ryan Fraser, CSIRO, Geosciences
• Terry Rankine, CSIRO, Geosciences
• 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

GridAustralia 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 (National Grid) 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.

The Virtual Data Toolkit provides MDS2 and MDS4. MDS2 is based on LDAP and is already deprecated. GridAustralia used to run MDS2 on the NG1 VMs until its members decide to put NG1 offline in August 2007. MDS4 is a set of WSRF services and is used on the NG2 VMs.

The MDS uses a hierarchical approach to providing resource information. The MDS4 Index Services running on the NG2 containers publish the information that they gather about the compute and storage resources to two central Index Services managed by SAPAC and UQ.

MDS can publish its information by using the GLUE schema. The GLUE schema is used by EGEE, LCG, Grid3/OSG, Globus and NorduGrid. GridAustralia currently uses GLUE Schema version 1.2 but is planning to move to GLUE Schema 2.0 when the GLUE-WS of OGF finalizes the new specification in 2008.

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. GridAustralia 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 GridAusGlueExtensions page if you want to know more about the fields that were added to the extensions document to support software packages.

User Requirements

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

Information Systems Installation and Configuration Guide

http://projects.gridaus.org.au/trac/systems/wiki/InfoSystems/InstallConfigSteps

How to Use the GridAustralia Information Service

• UsingMDSFour

Technical Reports/Papers

• Experiences in Deploying an MDS4 Grid Information System on the Australian National Grid - This paper was presented at the APAC 07 Conference.

Meeting Minutes

Archive

• OldMDS4ConfigInstructions
• InfoSysInstallConfigDocs

-- GersonGalang - 02 Dec 2007