GridAtlas — A grid application and resource configuration repository and discovery service

Although access to grid resources is realized through a standardized interface, independent grid resources are not only managed autonomously but are also accessed as independent entities. Such environment results in configuration differences among individual resources forcing users that access those resources to deal with the variability in resource configurations. This behaviour breaks the concept of interpreting the grid as a unified entity and forces the users to think of the grid in terms of individual resources. Concretely, this variability is expressed through the requirement for the users to explicitly state application installation properties on individual resources during each job submission. This is a tedious, error-prone and unnecessary process that acts as a barrier in the use of the grid. In this paper, a tool named GridAtlas is presented that keeps up with the details of individual resource and application configurations and makes such data easily accessible from a well-known location through Web-service API calls or a Web interface. This paper describes the architecture of the GridAtlas service along with use cases where GridAtlas has been successfully applied and illustrates the benefit of such a service in real grid environments.