Harmony - Advance Reservations in Heterogeneous Multi-domain Environments

Grid computing aims at offering standardized access to heterogeneous and distributed resources for scientific communities. In order to ensure certain quality of service requirements, the interconnecting networks have also be considered as Grid resources and must be taken into account for the co-scheduling process. However, most current systems do not support co-allocation of heterogeneous network resource provisioning systems and malleable advance reservations in multi-domain, multitechnology, and multi-vendor environments. Our approach, called Harmony, provides a functional service plane to unify the underlying network management systems and supports advanced reservation capabilities to utilize the available capacity and network resources in an efficient manner. The developed prototype has been demonstrated on numerous conferences and a preliminary performance evaluation of the current implementation is given.