An overview of MSHN: the Management System for Heterogeneous Networks

The Management System for Heterogeneous Networks (MSHN) is a resource management system for use in heterogeneous environments. This paper describes the goals of MSHN, its architecture, and both completed and ongoing research experiments. MSHN's main goal is to determine the best way to support the execution of many different applications, each with its own quality of service (QoS) requirements, in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. MSHN's architecture consists of seven distributed, potentially replicated components that communicate with one another using CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). MSHN's experimental investigations include: the accurate, transparent determination of the end-to-end status of resources; the identification of optimization criteria and how non-determinism and the granularity of models affect the performance of various scheduling heuristics that optimize those criteria; the determination of how security should be incorporated between components as well as how to account for security as a QoS attribute; and the identification of problems inherent in application and system characterization.