Specifying Resources and Services in Metacomputing Systems

With a steadily increasing number of services, metacomputing is now gaining importance in science and industry. Virtual organizations, autonomous agents, mobile computing services, and high-performance client–server applications are among the many examples of metacomputing services. For all of them, resource description plays a major role in organizing access, use, and administration of the computing components and software services. We present a generic Resource and Service Description (RSD) for specifying the hardware and software components of (meta-) computing environments. Its graphical interface allows metacomputer users to specify their resource requests. Its textual counterpart gives service providers the necessary flexibility to specify topology and properties of the available system and software resources. Finally, its internal object-oriented representation is used to link different resource management systems and service tools. With these three representations, our generic RSD approach is a key component for building metacomputer environments.