Generating Grid Resource Requirement Specifications

There is a clear trend of increased deployment of cluster platforms,
due to decreasing hardware costs, increasing choices in cluster
vendors, and increasing availability of open source cluster
management tools. At the same time there is a trend of improved
networking technology, with bandwidths reaching tens of Gigabits
per second. This increasing availability of computing resources
and increased bandwidths enable scientists to execute loosely
synchronous applications such as scientific workflows, which this
work targets, at a large scale.

Executing scientific workflows across wide-area resource
deployments is only possible with a middleware infrastructure for
connecting and executing application components. The
middleware infrastructure needs to address challenges such as
resource discovery, resource selection, resource monitoring,
resource binding (including negotiation with various resource
managers), and security issues. The Globus Alliance was formed
to consolidate knowledge and software; the resulting software
repository is the Globus Toolkit [1].