From Legion to Avaki: The Persistence of Vision

Grids have metamorphosed from academic projects to commercial ventures. Avaki, a leading commercial vendor of Grids, has its roots in Legion, a Grid project at the University of Virginia begun in 1993. In this chapter, we present fundamental challenges and requirements for Grid architectures that we believe are universal, our architectural philosophy in addressing those requirements, an overview of Legion as used in production systems and a synopsis of the Legion architecture and implementation. We also describe the history of the transformation from Legion – an academic, research project – to Avaki, a commercially supported, marketed product. Several of the design principles as well as the vision underlying Legion have continued to be employed in Avaki. As a product sold to customers, Avaki has been made more robust, more easily manageable and easier to configure than Legion, at the expense of eliminating some features and tools that are of less immediate use to customers. Finally, we place Legion in the context of OGSI, a standards effort underway in Global Grid Forum