GridOS: Operating System Services for Grid Architectures

Abstract

AbstractIn this work, we demonstrate the power of providing a common set of operating system services to Grid Architectures, including high-performance I/O, communication, resource management, and process management. In the last few years, a number of exciting projects like Globus, Legion, and UNICORE developed the software infrastructure needed for grid computing. However, operating system support for grid computing is minimal or non-existent. Tool writers are forced to re-invent the wheel by implementing from scratch. This is error prone and often results in sub-optimal solutions. To address these problems, we are developing GridOS, a set of operating system services that facilitate grid computing. The services are designed to make writing middleware easier and make a normal commodity operating system like Linux highly suitable for grid computing. The modules are designed to be policy neutral, exploit commonality in various grid infrastructures and provide high-performance. Experiments with GridOS verify that there is dramatic improvement in performance when compared to the existing grid file transfer protocols like GridFTP. Our proof-of-concept middleware shows that writing middleware is easy using GridOS.KeywordsTransmission Control ProtocolCongestion WindowGrid ApplicationSoftware InfrastructureGrid ArchitectureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.