A flexible architecture for job management in a grid environment

Job management is a key issue in computational grids, and normally involves job definition, scheduling, executing and monitoring. However, job management in the existing grid middleware needs to be improved in terms of efficiency and flexibility. This paper addresses a flexible architecture for job management with detailed design and implementation. Frameworks for job scheduling and monitoring, as two important aspects, are also presented. The proposed job management has the advantages of reusability of job definition, flexible and automatic file operation, visual steering of file transfer and job execution, and adaptive application job scheduler. A job management wizard is designed to implement each step. Therefore, what the grid user needs to do is only to define the job by constructing necessary information at runtime. In addition, the job space is adopted to ensure the security of the job management. Experimental results showed that this approach is user-friendly and system efficient.