SLA-aware Job Migration in Grid Environments

Grid Computing promises an efficient sharing of world-wide distributed resources, ranging from hardware, software, expert knowledge to special I/O devices. However, although the main Grid mechanisms are already developed or are currently addressed by tremendous research effort, the Grid environment still suffers from a low acceptance in different user communities. Beside difficulties regarding an intuitive and comfortable resource access, various problems related to the reliability and the Quality-of-Service while using the Grid exist. Users should be able to rely, that their jobs will have certain priority at the remote Grid site and that they will be finished upon the agreed time regardless of any provider problems. Therefore, QoS issues have to be considered in the Grid middleware but also in the local resource management systems at the Grid sites. However, most of the currently used resource management systems are not suitable for SLAs, as they do not support resource reservation and do not offer mechanisms for job checkpointing/migration respectively. The latter are mandatory for Grid providers as rescue anchor in case of system failures or system overload. This paper focuses on SLA-aware job migration and presents a work, which is being performed in the EU supported project HPC4U.