An overview of MSHN: the Management System for Heterogeneous Networks

The Management System for Heterogeneous Networks (MSHN) is a resource management system for use in heterogeneous environments. This paper describes the goals of MSHN, its architecture, and both completed and ongoing research experiments. MSHN´s main goal is to determine the best way to support the execution of many different applications, each with its own quality of service (QoS) requirements, in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. MSHN´s architecture consists of seven distributed, potentially replicated components that communicate with one another using CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture). MSHN´s experimental investigations include: the accurate, transparent determination of the end-to-end status of resources; the identification of optimization criteria and how non-determinism and the granularity of models affect the performance of various scheduling heuristics that optimize those criteria; the determination of how security should be incorporated between components as well as how to account for security as a QoS attribute; and the identification of problems inherent in application and system characterization