Policy-based active Grid management architecture

The term "Grid" was coined in the mid 1990s to denote a proposed distributed computing infrastructure for advanced science and technology. Due to the large scale of the Grid environment and its rapid expansion, both in resources and networking, it is becoming imperative to provide some kind of management mechanism to enable Grid computing to adapt to the various application requirements in a flexible and automated way. This paper proposes to introduce policy-based management, enhanced by an active network, to cope with this challenging requirement. Based on the analysis and comparison of three typical Grid architectures, this paper firstly presents a new view of Grid architecture that emphasizes the policy-based Grid management middleware and active network middleware. Then, the detailed design of these two middleware is discussed. A case study for controlled and secure massive storage access exemplifies this policy-based active Grid management architecture and shows that an improvement in manageability, automation and flexibility of the Grid system can be achieved.