Resource discovery and management in computational GRID environments

Corporations are currently using computational GRIDs to improve their operations. Future GRIDs will allow an organization to take advantage of computational GRIDs without having to develop a custom in-house solution. GRID resource providers (GRPs) make resources available on the GRID so that others may subscribe and use these resources. GRPs will 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 presents a review of existing resource discovery mechanisms within CGE.