Chapter 1 ON QUALITY OF SERVICE SUPPORT FOR GRID COMPUTING

∗Contact authors Abstract Computing Grids are hardware and software infrastructures that sup-port secure sharing and concurrent access to distributed services by a large number of competing users from different Virtual Organizations. Concurrency can easily lead to overload and resource shortcomings in large-scale Grid infrastructures, as today’s Grids do not offer differen-tiated services. We propose a framework for supporting Quality of Ser-vice guarantees via both reservation and discovery of best-effort services based on the matchmaking of application requirements and Quality of Service performance profiles of the candidate services. We illustrate the middleware components needed to support both strict and loose guar-2antees and the performance assessment techniques for the discovery of suitable services