I had the good fortune to attend the 1st Iberian Grid Infrastructure Conference this week, in beautiful Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. (Having also attended the 1st German eScience Conference two weeks before, I had to skip OGF 20 in Manchester last week.) It was an excellent meeting in every respect.
The keynote today was given by Professor Ignacio Martin Llorente from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He gave a nice survey of scheduling strategies for distributed grid systems and also presented the GridWay metascheduler developed in his group. This Globus-based system (and dev.globus project) enables large-scale, reliable and efficient sharing of computing resources (clusters, computing farms,servers, supercomputers...), managed by different local resource management systems, such as PBS, SGE, LSF, Condor..., within a single organization or distributed across several administrative domains.
Writing this entry, I realize that I like GridWay for five reasons:
- It provides powerful capabilities, including interfaces to many local resource managers, rich scheduling policies, interfaces from many schedulers (via so-called transfer queues.)
- It is used by many people to solve real problems--including people who are not paid to use it! (Example users: UABGrid at the University of Alabama Birmingham, AstroGrid-D in Germany, projects in China and India.)
- The GridWay team understands Globus deeply, and leverages Globus mechanisms to great advantage--just as the designers of those mechanisms intended.
- The GridWay team has embraced the dev.globus community development process.
- The GridWay team (like D-Grid and other brave souls) have been prepared to resist EU pressure to use only European software. Instead, they believe (correctly in my view) that we all benefit from the development and use of international software.
I also found this interesting comparison of GridWay and the EGEE workload management system, which shows GridWay in a good light. (Admittedly it was written by the GridWay team!)
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