Grid Activity Registration, Deployment and Provisioning Framework

Resource provisioning is a key concern for implementing an effective

resource management

as part of the Grid runtime environment; it delivers both physical and logical resources on-demand and shields the application developers from low level details. The previous chapter gives a general overview of the

resource management

(GridARM) with a detailed description of selection and brokerage problem of physical resources. This chapter introduces GLARE, an integral part of GridARM, that covers logical resources, particularly Grid

activities

[158]. Existing Grid resource managers concentrate mostly on physical resources. However, some advanced Grid programming environments allow application developers to specify Grid application components (activities) at a higher level of abstraction which then requires an effective mapping between high level resource descriptions i.e. activity types and actual installations i.e. activity deployments This chapter describes

GLARE

that provides dynamic registration, automatic deployment and on-demand provisioning of activities that can be used to build Grid applications. GLARE simplifies description and representation of both activity types (abstract descriptions) and activity deployments (concrete deployments) so that they can easily be located in the Grid and become available on-demand. GLARE has been implemented as a distributed registry and deployment service by following the superpeer model of GridARM [154].