Network QoS in Grid systems

Grid technologies have enabled the aggregation of geograph-ically distributed resources, in the context of a particular ap-plication. The network remains an important requirement for any Grid application, as entities involved in a Grid sys-tem (such as users, services, and data) need to communicate with each other over a network. The performance of the net-work must therefore be considered when carrying out tasks such as scheduling, migration or monitoring of jobs. Sur-prisingly, many existing QoS efforts ignore the network and focus instead on processor workload and disk access. Mak-ing use of the network in an efficient and fault tolerance manner, in the context of such existing research, leads to a significant number of research challenges. One way to address these problems is to make Grid middleware incor-porate the concept of autonomic systems. Such a change would involve the development of “self-configuring ” systems that are able to make decisions autonomously, and adapt themselves as the system status changes. We propose an autonomic network-aware scheduling infrastructure that is capable of adapting its behavior to the current status of the environment