The Lightweight Approach to Use Grid Services with Grid Widgets on Grid WebOS

Abstract

To bridge the gap between computing grid environment and users, various Grid Widgets are developed by the Grid development team in the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC). These widgets are implemented to provide users with seamless and scalable access to Grid resources. Currently, this effort integrates the de facto Grid middleware, Web-based Operating System (WebOS), and automatic resource allocation mechanism to form a virtual computer in distributed computing environment. With the capability of automatic resource allocation and the feature of dynamic load prediction, the Resource Broker (RB) improves the performance of the dynamic scheduling over conventional scheduling policies. With this extremely lightweight and flexible approach to acquire Grid services, the barrier for users to access geographically distributed heterogeneous Grid resources is largely reduced. The Grid Widgets can also be customized and configured to meet the demands of the users.