An interoperable information service solution for grids

Information services are a critical piece of Grid infrastructure, they collect, aggregate, and organize sources of Grid resource information, and provide the information to applications to schedule computational tasks, and enable Virtual Organizations (VO) to share distributed computing resources. To be successful an information provider needs to be able to aggregate diverse information from numerous sources, publish information into different Grid monitoring systems, function under different Grid deployments, and be adaptable to different information schemas. Addressing these challenges would provide a platform for an interoperable information service. In this chapter, we present the Modular Information Provider (MIP) that address the aforementioned challenges and eliminates the shortcomings of the existing Grid information providers. MIP adopts a XML-based data model to enable robust schema validation as well as to support the latest generation of service-oriented Grid monitoring software. MIP provides a critical capability for production Grid environments focusing on achieving Grid interoperability and manageability. To validate this we conduct experiments on the Open Science Grid and Grid Australia. These experiments demonstrate MIP’s Grid-independent approach is successful and can easily adapt to different software stacks and the heterogeneous configuration of several sites on a Grid. We use GISolve, a TeraGrid science gateway as an example to demonstrate how MIP is useful from the perspective of Grid application. GISolve provides a geospatial problem solving platform that hides the complexity of Grid information services based on MIP, which enables GISolve applications to access multiple Grids seamlessly. We illustrate how MIP is integrated within GISolve so that GISolve applications can benefit from the interoperable information service MIP provides.