GLARE: A Grid Activity Registration, Deployment and Provisioning Framework

Resource management is a key concern for implementing effective Grid middleware and shielding application developers from low level details. Existing resource managers concentrate mostly on physical resources. However, some advanced Grid programming environments allow application developers to specify Grid application components at high level of abstraction which then requires an effective mapping between high level application description (activity types) and actual deployed software components (activity deployments). This paper describes GLARE framework that provides dynamic registration, automatic deployment and on-demand provision of application components (activities) that can be used to build Grid applications. GLARE simplifies description and presentation of both activity types and deployments so that they can easily be located in the Grid and thus become available on-demand. GLARE has been implemented based on a super-peer model with support for activity leasing, self management, and fault tolerance. Experiments are shown to reflect the effectiveness of the GLARE.