Grid Maintenance: Challenges and Existing Models

As the world of grid computing is continuously growing, scalability and complexity of grid systems are in an increasing rate. Moreover, grid systems are dynamic and subject to various changes. Management of such changes is a challenging issue facing grid communities. Namely, how to efficiently maintain grid system to adopt the environment modification, to meet the user demands and to manage the dynamic changes has become a big challenge. Manual- or script based maintenance approaches are tedious, time consuming and complex, in addition to being highly prone to errors. Therefore, state-of-the-art maintenance models are designed to support transparent runtime maintenance, fast and comprehensive respond to environmental changes and requirements, consequently, improve the availability and efficiency of the grid system. This paper focuses on investigating maintenance models and their common characteristics for grid. To this end, this paper surveys several representative grid maintenance model systems developed by various projects worldwide. The contributions of this paper are (i) discussing the motivations of maintenance for grid system, (ii) discussing the issues and the challenges in building maintenance mechanisms for grid system, (iii) reviewing maintenance models and compare their efficiencies for grid system, and (iv) discussing possible new directions.