Supporting interoperability of e-science infrastructures with a common information service

The heterogeneity of Grid resources (e.g. compute, storage, and network) that are geographically dispersed creates a fundamental challenge in terms of their discovery and monitoring process in production Grids today. In order to overcome these challenges, a wide variety of information models and services are developed that provide proprietary solutions in rather complex ways. Many of those services lack simplicity with respect to the setup, resource registration, maintenance, and security, thus making the information system complex and hard to use, especially in Grids driven by High Performance Computing (HPC) needs such as DEISA. In this paper we present a Common Information Service (CIS), which represents an information service, which aims to provide the functionality required to seamlessly aggregate and expose Grid resource information from various heterogeneous resources. The contribution of this paper is about using the emerging OGF GLUE2 standard information model for structuring Grid resource information in order to achieve the interoperability with other Grid technologies in general and other information systems in particular. Using this standard, our contribution provides insights of how CIS publishes and discovers resource and service information in the context of Web services based UNICORE Grids (e.g. DEISA, D-Grid) and highlights example deployments of the D-Mon project. Since the availability of up-to-date information is essential for Grid interoperability, we furthermore provide insights of how CIS can be used to contribute to cross-Grid applications based on the Infrastructure Interoperability Reference Model (IIRM).