Automatic Services Discovery, Monitoring and Visualization of Grid Environments: The MapCenter Approach

Abstract

The complexity of grid environments is growing as more projects and applications appear in this quick-evolving domain. Widespread applications are distributed over thousands of computing elements, various communities of users are aggregated into virtual organizations so resources availability is more and more dynamic and final locations of jobs cannot be foreseen. In such contexts, new paradigms and constraints which deeply impact monitoring and visualization possibilities must be addressed. As nodes and even sites appear and disappear quickly in grids, automated resource and service discovery must be performed and launched at a frequency compatible with the dynamic of grid elements. The numerous production sites involved in a grid have their own security policies and system administration principles and procedures, which can eventually be outsourced. A global grid monitoring system must be efficient and not intrusive with respect to security policies and should not interfere with site local rules like logging and auditing. In addition, to nodes and sites the large number of applications and virtual organizations generates multiple, different, abstract views of the grid environments. A grid visualization tool has to be opened and flexible to represent all corresponding virtual views needed. The tool MapCenter has been designed to cope with these new grid monitoring challenges.