A Specialized Meta-scheduler for Business and Applications Constraints Management

The process of meta-scheduling, also called brokering, is a key feature in the architecture of typical computational grids. Indeed, a grid meta-scheduler - or grid broker for short - is responsible for the load balancing work between sites which constitute the grid. Many grid broker projects currently exist and among them, an increasing number have reached maturity obstacles that slow down their use. On one hand, some meta-schedulers are tied to an environment or a middleware requiring users to adopt the whole infrastructure in order to use them. On another hand, some other meta-schedulers are difficult to deploy. Generally speaking, most of the grid brokers are designed for an all-purposes use and may not fit the needs of specific usage where domain or business constraints have to be taken into account. The latter situation happened in the scope of the BEinGRID project where a business experiment in grid technologies required handling domain specific scheduling constraints. Precisely, infrastructure and planning constraints were so strong that they required to define trade-offs. This paper describes how a lightweight, configurable and easy to deploy meta-scheduler was implemented to meet those constraints. More importantly, it is addressed how to be able to apply and to easily change business and domain specific rules while performing job scheduling and resource allocation. The resulting generic grid broker has been applied to image rendering for architects, allowing to respect specific constraints of 3D rendering software as well as to base resource allocation on the analysis of architectural models.