IMAGE: an approach to building standards-based enterprise grids

We describe a system for aggregating heterogeneous resources from distinct administrative domains into an enterprise-wide compute grid, such that the aggregated resource provides the services of reliable and flexible queuing, scheduling, execution, and monitoring of batch applications. The system provides scheduling across multiple cluster grids, user account mapping across domains, and file staging, thereby enabling the consolidation of organization-wide distributed resources into a virtual resource, while preserving local control of resources. The concept of abstract queue, as the unit of aggregating heterogeneous resources, is introduced and instantiated for distributed resource scheduling. The proposed system is an open source, standards-based alternative to similar commercial systems