Virtual playgrounds: managing virtual resources in the grid

Large grid deployments increasingly require abstractions and methods decoupling the work of resource providers and resource consumers to implement scalable management methods. We proposed the abstraction of a virtual workspace (VW) describing a virtual execution environment that can be made dynamically available to authorized grid clients by using well-defined protocols. Virtual workspaces provide resources in controllable ways that are independent of how a resource is consumed. A virtual playground may combine many such workspaces, as well as other aspects of virtual environments, such as networking and storage, to form virtual grids. In this paper, we report on the goals and progress of the virtual playground project and put in context the research to date.