Discovering resources in computational GRID environments

Corporations are using computational GRIDs to improve their operations. Future GRIDs will allow an organisation to take advantage of computational GRIDs without having to develop a custom in-house solution. GRID Resource Providers (GRP) make resources available on the GRID so that others may use these resources. GRPs allow companies to make use of a range of resources such as processing power or mass storage. However simply providing resources is not enough to ensure the success of a computational GRID. Access to these resources must be controlled otherwise computational GRIDs will simply evolve to become a victim of their own success, unable to offer a suitable Quality of Service (QoS) to any user. The task of providing a standard querying mechanism for Computational GRID Environments (CGE) has already witnessed considerable work from groups such as the Globus project who have delivered the Metacomputing Directory Service (MDS) which provides a means to query devices attached to the GRID. This paper describes a monitoring component both capable of the dynamic discovery of available resources in a computing GRID environment and executing user jobs on the available resource at a given moment in time. Consideration has been paid to integrating with GRID accounting systems.