An Architecture for Distributed Grid Brokering

Computational resource brokering on the Grid is the process of discovering what systems are capable of running a job, obtaining estimates for when that job may run and how much it will cost, and submitting the job to the system that best meets the users’ requirements. This paper identifies how resource brokers differ from superschedulers, and describes a resource brokering architecture which is adapted to the emergent structure of the large-scale Grid. We outline the architecture of the UNICORE resource broker which is the basis of our prototype implementation, and discusses both how the existing UNICORE architecture is relevant to the wider brokering picture and what will be done in the future to bring them into closer alignment.