Enabling interoperability among meta-schedulers

Grid computing supports shared access to computing resources from cooperating organizations or institutes in the form of virtual organizations. Resource brokering middleware, commonly known as a meta-scheduler or a resource broker, matches jobs to distributed resources. Recent advances in meta-scheduling capabilities are extended to enable resource matching across multiple virtual organizations. Several architectures have been proposed for interoperating meta-scheduling systems. This paper presents a hybrid approach, combining hierarchical and peer-to-peer architectures for flexibility and extensibility of these systems. A set of protocols are introduced to allow different meta-scheduler instances to communicate over Web Services. Interoperability between three heterogeneous and distributed organizations (namely, BSC, FIU, and IBM), each using different meta-scheduling technologies, is demonstrated under these protocols and resource models. © 2008 IEEE.