Hierarchical submission in a Grid environment

Abstract

One of the challenges in grid computing research is to provide means to automatically submit, manage, and monitor applications which spread a large number of tasks. The usual way of managing these tasks is to represent each one as an explicit node in a graph, and this is the approach taken by many grid systems up to date. This approach can quickly saturate the machine where the application is launched, as we increase the number of tasks. In this work we present and validate a novel architectural model, GRAND (Grid Robust ApplicatioN Deployment), whose main objective is to deal with the problem of memory and load saturation of the submission machine. GRAND is implemented at a middleware level, aiming at providing a distributed task submission through a hierarchical organization. This paper provides an overview of the GRAND submission model as well our implementation. Initial results show that our approach can be much more effective than other approaches in the literature.