Utility Job Submission

Google Summer of Code 2008 ideas

Primary Mentor: Stephen McGough (asm at doc.ic.ac.uk)
Secondary Mentor: Jeremy Cohen
OMII Project: GridSAM.

Description

The idea behind Utility computing is the separation of the resource providers from the software providers. This allows software developers to make their software available without the need for provisioning resources to run it on and for resource providers to expose resources without the need to limit themselves to a pre-defined set of software. When a user requests the use of a service (which is considered the bonding of software and resource) the Utility environment is responsible for bringing appropriate software and resources together before invoking the service. Both the software provider and resource provider can be compensated (financially) for their use.

The GridSAM project is an open source project for making resources available through a standardised job submission interface BES using a standardised job submission language JSDL available from the Open Grid Forum. GridSAM provides a veneer over existing resources (either clusters or single computers) which translates the incoming standardised job submission into the format required by the underlying architecture. The intention in this project is to develop a Utility computing platform with GridSAM being used to expose the resources available. A software repository would be developed where software developers could deposit their software along with metadata describing its functionality, where it can run and how to run it. The Utility service could then take requests for service invocations, provision the appropriate software onto a GridSAM exposed resource before executing the newly formed service. It would be desirable if a financial element could be developed into this project such that both the resource and the software providers could be recompensed for their use.

Project Requirements

A programmer who is experienced in Java, Web Services, XML.