About

Grids offer a dramatic increase in the number of available processing and storing resources that can be delivered to applications. However, efficient job submission and management continue being far from accessible to ordinary scientists and engineers due to their dynamic and complex nature. The aim of the GridWay Metascheduler is to automatically perform all the submission steps and also to provide the runtime mechanisms needed for dynamically adapting the application execution. The GridWay framework has been developed to reduce the gap between Grid middleware and application developers, providing end users and application developers with a consistent and familiar working environment to access all cluster, Grid and Cloud resources in the organization.

GridWay is a workload manager that performs job execution management and resource brokering on a Grid consisting of distinct computing platforms that could be dynamically extended with Cloud resources. GridWay allows unattended, reliable, and efficient execution of single, array, or complex jobs, both sequential or parallel, on heterogeneous and dynamic Grids. GridWay performs all the job scheduling and submission steps transparently to the end user and adapts job execution to changing grid conditions by providing fault recovery mechanisms, dynamic scheduling, migration on-request and opportunistic migration. GridWay provides decoupling between applications and the underlying local management systems.

GridWay supports the deployment of:

• Enterprise Grids that enable diverse resource sharing to improve internal collaboration and achieve a better return from their information technology investment.
• Partner Grids of several scales that are mainly deployed within the context of different research projects, and whose final goal is to provide large-scale, secure and reliable sharing of resources among partner organizations and supply-chain participants. Such partner grids allow access to a higher computing performance to satisfy peak demands and also provide support to face collaborative projects.
• Grid Infrastructure Cloudbursting, that enable the dynamic grow of enterprise and partner Grids using resources from IaaS Cloud providers.

GridWay modular architecture offers the following benefits:

• Easy Deployment: GridWay does not require new services, apart from basic services provided by the middleware. The scheduler supports the existing remote platforms and resource managers (fork, PBS, SGE, LSF, LoadLeveler, Condor…)
• Adaptability and Extension Capability: GridWay modular architecture allows communication with the resource management, file management and information services available in a given infrastructure. GridWay could be extended or used as a building block for more complex architectures that implements service-level agreements (SLAs) or advanced reservation.
• Site Autonomy Support: Grid resources belong to different administrative domains; so that, once a job is submitted, it can be freely cancelled by the resource owner. The resources can be added or removed continuously.
• Dynamic Environment Management: Grid resources may be simultaneously exploited by other grid users, as well as by internal users.
• Grid Interoperation: Different grid infrastructures and middlewares can be used simultaneously.
• Lower Infrastructure Expenses: Combination of local and remote Cloud resources, so eliminating the over-purchase of systems to meet peaks demands.

GridWay provides the end-user with a working environment and functionality similar to those found on local DRM systems, such as SGE, LSF or PBS. The end-user is able to submit, monitor and control his jobs by means of DRM-like commands (gwsubmit, gwwait, gwkill…) or standard programming interfaces. particular:

• Reliable and Unattended Execution of Jobs: Transparently to the end user, the scheduler is able to manage the different failure situations.
• Efficient Execution of Jobs: Jobs are executed on the faster available resources.
• Broad application scope: GridWay is not bounded to a specific class of application generated by a given programming environment and does not require application deployment on remote hosts, which extends its application range and allows reusing of existing software. GridWay allows Submission of single, array or complex jobs consisting of task dependencies, which may require file transferring and/or database access.
• DRM Command Line Interface: The GridWay command line interface is similar to that found on Unix and resource management systems such as PBS or SGE. It allows users to submit, kill, migrate, monitor and synchronize jobs, that could be described using the OGF standard JSDL.
• DRMAA Application Programming Interface: GridWay provides full support for OGF standard DRMAA to develop distributed applications (C, JAVA, Perl, Ruby and Python bindings).

We have prepared a criteria checklist to compare your meta-scheduler with GridWay. Its modular architecture allows to fulfil requirements not included in the following checklist with low effort. Do not hesitate to contact us if you require more information on Future Releases and Technical Support.

The GridWay project started in September 2002. The first releases of the metascheduler were developed for research purposes in adaptive and dynamic scheduling and were only distributed on request in binary format. The first open source version, GridWay 4.0, and the project website were released in January 2005. The code is currently distributed under Apache license, version 2.0. The last release is the result of the knowledge and experience gained through years of research and development and the feedback from our user community. GridWay joined the dev.globus incubation process in May 2006, being the first ever project to escalate to a full Globus project in January 2007. GridWay so adheres to Globus philosophy and guidelines for collaborative development.

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