Specifying and Processing Co-Reservations in the Grid

Abstract: Executing complex applications on Grid infrastructures necessitates the guaran-teed allocation of multiple resources. Such guarantees are often implemented by means of advance reservations. Reserving resources in advance requires multiple steps – beginning with their description to their actual allocation. In a Grid, a client possesses little knowl-edge about the future status of resources. Thus, manually specifying successful parameters of a co-reservation is a tedious task. Instead, we propose to parametrize certain reservation characteristics (e.g., the start time) and to let a client define criteria for selecting appropri-ate values. Then, a Grid reservation service processes such requests by determining the future status of resources and calculating a co-reservation candidate which satisfies the cri-teria. In this paper, we present the Simple Reservation Language (SRL) for describing the requests, demonstrate the transformation of an example request into an integer program us-ing the Zuse Institute Mathematical Programming Language (ZIMPL) and experimentally evaluate the time needed to find the optimal co-reservation using CPLEX.