Determining the Availability of Grid Resources Using Active Probing

Determining qualitative availability aspects of Grid resources is a complex and cumbersome task because of the inherent characteristics of a Grid like Virtual Organizations. To cope with these challenges we argue for a more qualitative specification of availability which respects inter-organizational aspects besides pure technical values and percentages. Although there are several existing approaches and tools to determine the availability of Grid resources, none of them supports our perspective of availability adequate enough. We propose with DAGA (Determining the Availability of Grid-Resources using Active Probing) a new approach which is both service oriented and active probing based. DAGA respects the specifics of Grid architectures, such as VO-specific authorization and authentication.