Resource management services for a grid analysis environment

Selecting optimal resources for submitting jobs on a computational grid or accessing data from a data grid is one of the most important tasks of any grid middleware. Most modern grid software today satisfies this responsibility and gives a best-effort performance to solve this problem. Almost all decisions regarding scheduling and data access are made by the software automatically, giving users little or no control over the entire process. To solve this problem, a more interactive set of services and middleware is desired that provides users more information about grid weather, and gives them more control over the decision making process. This paper presents a set of services that have been developed to provide more interactive resource management capabilities within the grid analysis environment (GAE) being developed collaboratively by Caltech, NUST and several other institutes. These include a steering service, a job monitoring service and an estimator service that have been designed and written using a common grid-enabled Web services framework named Clarens. The paper also presents a performance analysis of the developed services to show that they have indeed resulted in a more interactive and powerful system for user-centric grid-enabled physics analysis.