Managing Service Levels in Grid Computing Systems

Abstract We study,techniques,to enforce and,provision,differentiated service levels in Compu- tational Grid systems. The Grid offers simplified provisioning,of peak-capacity,for appli- cations with computational requirements beyond local machines and clusters, by sharing resources across organizational,boundaries.,Current systems,have focussed on access con- trol, i.e., managing who is allowed to run applications on remote sites. Very little work has been,done,on providing,differentiated service levels for those applications that are admitted. This leads to a number,of problems,when,scheduling,jobs in a fair and,efficient way. For example, users with a large number of long-running jobs could starve out others, both,intentionally and,non-intentionally. We investigate the requirements,of High Performance,Computing,(HPC) applications that run in academic Grid systems, and propose two models of service-level management. Our first model is based on global real-time quota enforcement, where projects are granted resource quota, such as CPU hours, across the Grid by a centralized allocation authority. We implement,the SweGrid Accounting,System to enforce quota,allocated by the Swedish National Allocations Committee in the SweGrid production Grid, which connects six Swedish HPC centers. A flexible authorization,policy framework,allows provisioning,and