The Gridbus Project at the University of Melbourne (Australia) released a new version of the Grid Service Broker. The broker provides capabilities such as resource selection, job scheduling, job management and data access to any application that requires distributed grid resources for execution. The broker handles communication with the resources running different grid middleware, job failures, varying resource availability and different user objectives, such as meeting a deadline for execution or limiting execution within a certain budget.

With the current release, version 3.1, a new organizational structure is provided for the broker, wherein the core is separated from additional capabilities provided as plug-ins that can be selected according to usage requirements. A new Ant build file has been provided to enable selection of plug-ins and the automatic configuration of the broker thereof. Also available is a new external plug-in that uses the capabilities of the Gridbus broker to schedule grid workflows.

New features include:

• Plug-in structure for middleware and programming models.

• Ant build file for automatic downloading and configuration of broker installation.

• Workflow engine plug-in.

• Thread programming model plug-in (similar to Alchemi Grid Threads).

Gridbus in e-Science Enablements

The Gridbus Broker has been used in Grid enabling several e-Science and e-Business applications. The most recent usages include:

• European Union-funded Data Mining Grid Project, which developed set of grid-based data-mining tools and used Gridbus Broker in managing execution of data mining computations on global grids: www.datamininggrid.org/.

• KidneyGrid partners, including Melbourne Medical School and Université d'Evry (France), created a grid portal that integrated distributed kidney models.

• As part of the Australian National Grid (APACGrid), a portal for docking of molecules from CDB with protein target with the aim of discovery potential drug candidates: http://grid.apac.edu.au/OurUsers/MolecularDocking.

Base Technologies

The Gridbus Broker v3.1 supports/uses the following middleware: Globus 2.4.x, Globus 4.0.2, Alchemi 1.0.6, Condor 6.8.4, OpenPBS 2.3, SGE, NWS 2.8, SRB(Storage Resource Broker) 3.x The Gridbus Broker v3.1 supports/uses the following programming model:

• Task/Job model.

• Gridbus Workflow.

• Grid Threading Programming Model.

The Gridbus Broker v3.1 can utilize a resource via SSH for submitting and executing grid jobs on: OpenPBS 2.3, Condor 6.8.4, SGE, Fork (on Unix-like OSes).

The broker source code,binaries, documentation and manual can be downloaded from www.gridbus.org/broker/.

The Gridbus broker and the GUI is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) (www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt). Other libraries included in the distribution are distributed under their own respective licenses which are also included.

This product includes software developed by and/or derived from the Globus project (www.globus.org/). This product includes dom4j libraries (www.dom4j.org).  Other licenses can be found in the licenses directory of the Gridbus Broker v3.1 distribution.

The Gridbus Broker is developed by the Gridbus Project, Grid Computing and Distributed Systems (GRIDS) Lab., Dept. of Computer Science and Software Engineering, the University of Melbourne. The project is currently supported by the Australian Research Council and DEST (Department of Education, Science and Training) grants and the University of Melbourne. For further information on the Gridbus Project, visit www.gridbus.org/.

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Source: Gridbus Project