The Microgrid: Enabling Scientific Study of Dynamic Grid Behavior

Abstract

A fundamental property of Grids is the dynamic sharing of resources, and the adaptation of application behavior in resource use to dynamic attributes of the resource environment. Such dynamism poses interesting challenges in communication, resource scheduling, and system stability.

To study network, compute resource, and application properties in support of developing appropriate protocols, we have designed, built, and validated a set of grid modelling tools called the MicroGrid. These tools enable entire, unmodified Grid applications to be run against arbitrary network, compute, and storage resource environments, enabling study of these issues of dynamism software in a broad and thorough fashion. We describe the design of the MicroGrid system, its capabilities, and how we solved a number of interesting challenges in its design, including resource virtualization, scalable network emulation, and background workload generation. We describe some studies which use the MicroGrid to study the behavior of dynamic Grid applications and Grid resources.

The MicroGrid is part of the NSF funded Virtual Grid Application Development Software (VGrADS) research project.