A Prototype System for Advance Reservations in a Biomedical Grid Computing Visualization Infrastructure

The infrastructure of the German Grid Initiative is mainly used for computational jobs. A visualization infrastructure to process and visualize, among others, medical imaging and genome data, was set up for the German biomedical community. Interactive jobs like these require advance reservations, since they are used in combination with computational jobs. Thus, a reservation management system is needed. An evaluation of the existing scheduling system, and of solutions with other scheduling tools, showed that no existing approach fits all of the requirements. Therefore, a new solution had to be found. Within this work, the prototype of a database-based reservation management system, which uses the MediGRID portal as a user interface, is described. This system allows the advance reservation of time slots for visualization sessions. Challenges of this system, e.g. the combined use of resources with computational jobs and visualization sessions, are discussed.