Affiliations: London e-Science Centre, Imperial College London,
London, UK. E-mail: {asm,aakram1,liguo,marko,lwd03}@doc.ic.ac.uk | High Energy Physics Group, Imperial College London,
London, UK. E-mail: {d.colling,janusz.martyniak}@imperial.ac.uk | Brunel University, School of Engineering & Design,
Uxbridge, UK. E-mail:
{Roger.Powell,Paul.Kyberd,Chenxi.Huang}@brunel.ac.uk | Computing Systems Laboratory, National Technical
University of Athens, Athens, Greece. E-mail: ckotso@cslab.ece.grnet.gr,
panag@cs.ntua.gr
Abstract: The over-arching aim of Grid computing is to move computational
resources from individual institutions where they can only be used for in-house
work, to a more open vision of vast online ubiquitous `virtual computational'
resources which support individuals and collaborative projects. A major step
towards realizing this vision is the provision of instrumentation – such
as telescopes, accelerators or electrical power stations – as Grid
resources, and the tools to manage these resources online. The GRIDCC project
attempts to satisfy these requirements by providing the following four
co-dependent components; a flexible wrapper for publishing instruments as Grid
resources; workflow support for the orchestration of multiple Grid resources in
a timely manner; the machinery to make reservation agreements on Grid
resources; and the facility to satisfy quality of service (QoS) requirements on
elements within workflows. In this paper we detail the set of services
developed as part of the GRIDCC project to provide the last three of these
components. We provide a detailed architecture for these services along with
experimental results from load testing experiments. These services are
currently deployed as a test-bed at a number of institutions across Europe, and
are poised to provide a 'virtual lab' to production level applications.
