The Palantir Grid Meta-Information System

Grids allow large scale resource-sharing across different administrative domains. Those diverse resources are likely to join or quit the grid at any moment or possibly to break down. Grid monitoring tools have to adapt supporting access information to these heterogeneous and not reliable environments. There is a wide rage of types of resources to be monitored, with different nature, characteristics and so on. For instance grid users want to monitor from which is the state of the jobs that submit till how many processors has a given resources of a given centre. These issues make the task of monitoring complex to treat, and it is difficult to provide a generals ways for accessing to all this information. In this work we propose a set of functionalities that a grid information system should provide. We describe the Palantir meta-information system that has been designed for uniform the access to different monitoring and information systems and that implements all the discussed functionalities. This meta-information system tries to abstract the resource information that underlies on the local systems, and homogenize the access to all this. We present the architecture of Palantir and its main characteristics