Earliest Start Time Estimation for Advance Reservation-Based Resource Brokering within Computational Grids

The ability to conduct advance reservations within grid environments is crucial for applications that want to utilize distributed resources in a predictable and efficient way. Advance reservations are essential for supporting deadline driven applications and the co-allocation of distributed resources. Further, advance reservations can significantly enhance the capabilities of resource brokers. Many Local Resource Management Systems (LRMSs), e.g. Torque/Maui, PBSPro and LSF, provide support for advance reservations. However, these capabilities are usually not accessible via the grid middleware. This paper presents and evaluates a job broker architecture that addresses this deficit and provides support for advance reservation on grid-level as well as a reservation-aware grid resource broker. A core component of the presented job broker architecture is the Earliest Start Time Estimator (ESE), which predicts queuing delays at grid resources. The job broker service is part of the Migol system - a grid middleware that addresses the fault tolerance of applications by offering capabilities such as automatic monitoring and recoveries.