Right now, the resource managers that control the allocation of processor, memory, storage, and bandwidth to jobs running across grids or clusters of grids use their own management APIs, which means that one grid program cannot reach in and take control of another one. This is akin to using different gauge tracks in a railroad, which effectively isolates trains in one system from the other. This is great for controlling those assets, but it limits the usefulness and breadth of the railroad. While open source programs like the Globus Toolkit specify how to connect different grids together, that is not the same thing as managing the flow of work inside a grid and across collectives of grids.
While Sun and Intel chaired the GGF initiative, IBM Corp, Platform Computing, Cadence, and a number of other players contributed to the generation of the specification document, which is the closest thing to a standard that the GGF endorses. (GGF doesn’t use the word standard for some reason.)
The whole aim of the DRMAA spec is to provide a consistent and compatible set of APIs that grid software makers, application software providers, portal vendors, and distributed resource management program makers will agree to use to spur the adoption of grid technologies in areas outside of the esoteric high-performance computing arena. That said, such a spec, if adopted by ISVs and implemented in open source technical applications and middleware, will be very useful to the HPC community, which is very much into building and sharing grids these days.
The DRMAA spec will be reviewed by the GGF and grid community for 60 days, according to Peter Jeffcock, group marketing manager for grid computing at Sun. After comments, the spec could change and then be put back on public review before being given full document status (again, this is as close to being a standard that GGF gets.) He says that there is not a set of standard APIs for grid resource management, although there is apparently a limited POSIX standard for scripting that has been somewhat useful with grid management. What DRMAA wants to create, he says, is a standard set of APIs for submitting, controlling, and monitoring applications submitted to grids, regardless of the underlying hardware, operating system, or grid middleware. In effect, with these APIs, applications will be able to reach out into grids and see where they can best run, based on permissions and access, rather than having to manage the allocation of resources to applications by hand, which is the way it gets done now.
Jeffcock says that after the DRMAA spec has been reviewed and approved, Sun will implement the spec in its open source implementation of Grid Engine, the grid computing software that Sun sells for Solaris and Linux machines. Sun will provide this reference implementation of DRMAA on Grid Engine as an open source program and will do so on a royalty-free basis. timpm@computerwire.com
Source: Computerwire
