Dynamic Grid Catalog Information Service

Computational grids are heterogeneous, dynamic and distributed environments that enable large-scale sharing of resources within groups of individuals and/or institutions [9]. A grid environment collects a lot of information and information itself is a critical resource in computational grids, so it is necessary to well administrate it. A fundamental element in a grid infrastructure is the Information Service that provides some basic mechanisms for discovering and monitoring distributed resources. In Globus Toolkit, Monitoring and Discovery Service (MDS) [4,5,10], provides directory services for grids. It allows to manage static and dynamic information about the status of a computational grid and all its components and it uses Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) [2], as a uniform interface to such information. In this paper we propose a Dynamic Grid Catalog Information Service (DGC), that is a complementary approach based on relational data model [3,6,7,8]. Our DGC Information Service has been designed to meet a lot of requirements such as access to static, dynamic information related to grid resources, uniform, flexible access to information, efficient and secure access to dynamic data, decentralized maintenance, fault tolerance, etc., in order to achieve better performance, scalability, security, extensibility and decentralized control and maintenance. In the DGC Information Service that we envision a lot of information will be stored. For instance: