The Design, Usage, and Performance of GRUBER: A Grid Usage Service Level Agreement based BrokERing Infrastructure

Abstract

We present GRUBER, a Grid Resource Usage service level agreement (uSLA) based BrokERing infrastructure, aimed at addressing the challenging issues that can arise within virtual organizations (VOs) that integrate participants and resources spanning multiple physical administrative domains. In such environments, participants delegate to one or more VOs the right to use certain resources subject to local policy and service level agreements; each VO then uses those resources subject to VO policy. GRUBER supports the explicit representation, enforcement, and management of service level agreements (SLAs) concerning resource usage (uSLAs) that can serve as an objective organizing principle for controlled resource sharing in distributed systems. uSLAs express how resources must be used over various time intervals and represent a novelty for the Grid domain. This paper provides a detailed overview of the GRUBER infrastructure, the evolution of its design to improve scalability, specifically the distribution of the resource brokering service, and the extended support for dynamic environments. We also present various results achieved over time that demonstrate both the utility and performance of GRUBER under various application workloads and scenarios.