Agreement-Based Resource Management

One of the criteria for the Grid infrastructure is the ability to share resources with nontrivial qualities of service. However, sharing resources in Grids is complicated in that is requires the ability bridge the differing policy requirements of the resource owners to create a consistent cross-organizational policy domain that delivers the necessary capability to the end user while respecting the policy requirements of the resource owner. Further complicating the management of Grid resources is the need to coordinate resource usage, the diversity of resource types and the variety of different management modes that may be used. We present a unifying resource management framework in which we can address these issues. The fundamental underlying concept in this framework is the representation of various resource management activities in terms of an agreement. Agreements abstract local management policy by representing an underlying resource strictly in terms of policy terms which it is willing to assert, and in doing so provides the basis for building a variety of alternative Grid resource management strategies. We introduce the concepts of agreement based resource management. We present a general agreement model and examine current resource management systems in the context of this model. We then discuss how agreement based resource management is being used as the basis for standards activities and next generation resource management services.