CARE Resource Broker: A framework for scheduling and supporting virtual resource management

Scheduling application in grid is a complex task that often fails due to nonavailability of resources and the required execution environment in the resources. The CARE Resource Broker (CRB) proposed in this paper addresses such scheduling scenarios using the concepts of virtualization. The virtualization technology offers effective resource management mechanisms such as isolated, secure job scheduling, and utilization of computing resources to the possible extent. However, lack of protocols and services to support virtualization technology in high level grid architecture does not allow management of virtual machines and virtual clusters in grid environment. CRB proposes and implements necessary protocols and services to support creation and management of virtual resources in the physical hosts. Unlike the conventional grid schedulers, CRB addresses several cases of failure of application scheduling such as nonavailability of enough computing nodes in a cluster, and, nonavailability of software execution environment in any of the grid resources. It deploys the required number of virtual machines in potential computing resources to meet the application requirements, and creates virtual clusters dynamically; configure with the required software execution environment for facilitating application execution. Thus, CRB improves the overall throughput by scheduling more applications than conventional grid schedulers and increases the utilization of underutilized computing resources in grid. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.