Interoperable Information Exchange, Resource Discovery, and Service Quality Monitoring Across Virtual Organizations in Distributed Research Infrastructures

Abstract

Recently, distributed research infrastructures were built up to feed the emerging resource demand of research institutes and enable researchers from various disciplines to access cutting edge technologies. More recently, the different research disciplines began to approach each other in the mutual goal to answer increasingly complex research problems. It has therefore become increasingly important for research infrastructures to interoperate. Exchanging resource descriptions coming from the information and monitoring systems of different research infrastructures is among the most important steps to reach interoperability. The aim of this thesis is to develop and realise a concept of an interoperable information and monitoring system, which can be used transparently with different existing distributed research infrastructures. This concept also extends the scope of existing information services by including resource properties relating to quality of service and organisational items. We focus on the information and monitoring systems, because of their importance for the other components of distributed research infrastructures. Exchanging resource descriptions, discovering resources, and monitoring the quality and availability of computing and storage resources are essential for executing jobs or transferring data in distributed research infrastructures. Based on a requirement analysis of application scenarios we identify the information needed for exchanging resource descriptions and provide a theoretical model which is capable to include that information. We also present a theoretical approach for a schema mediation process. For modeling resource descriptions in distributed research environments many information schemas and data models exist. In addition to the theoretical analysis, we discuss the evaluation of information schemas being utilized in productional environments. Based on these results, a concept of an automated resource exchange process and a respective generic monitoring architecture supporting it are provided. In addition to our theoretical analysis, concept, and models, a proof of concept for distributed research infrastructures has been developed. We also design and develop a simulation framework for service-oriented, multi-middleware environments that is based on automated system deployment and service provisioning. The evaluation is done by artificial simulation experiments in the simulation framework and in real system scenarios, which demonstrate the applicability of our concept.