Attributes for Communication Between Grid Scheduling Instances

Typically, Grid resources are subject to individual access and usage policies because they are provided by different owners. These policies are usually enforced by local management systems that maintain control of the resources. However, few Grid users are willing to deal with those management systems directly in order to coordinate the resource allocation for their jobs. This leads to a Grid scheduling architecture with several layers. In such an architecture, a higher-level Grid scheduling layer and the lower-level layer of local scheduling systems must efficiently cooperate in order to make the best use of Grid resources. In this chapter we describe attributes characterizing those features of local management systems that can be exploited by a Grid scheduler.