Provisioning and scheduling resources for worldwide data-sharing services

Grid computing is becoming the natural way to aggregate and share large and heterogeneous sets of resources. However, grid development and acceptance hinge on proving that grids reliably support large communities of users, and their real applications. In this paper we assess the ability of existing grid infrastructures to provision resources for a class of applications with numerous potential users, namely the class of world-wide data-sharing services. For this purpose, we first analyze the requirements of this class of applications, and match them against the existing spare capacity in three existing large-scale grid environments, namely OSG/Grid3, NorduGrid, and CERN LCG. We then address the need to allocate insufficient resources to world-wide data-sharing services by introducing and assessing through trace-based simulation five domain-specific scheduling policies. Our findings support the idea that grid technology could be leveraged with great success for existing and future world-wide data-sharing services, without impacting the level of service for the currently existing load.