The need for self-managed access nodes in grid environments.

The Grid is constantly growing and it is being used by more and more applications. In this scenario the entry node is an important component in the whole architecture and will become a contention point. In this paper we will demonstrate that the use of a self-managed layer on the entry node of a grid is necessary. A self-managed system can allow more jobs to be accepted and finished correctly. Since it's not acceptable for a grid middleware layer to lose jobs, we would normally need to prioritize the finishing/acceptance of jobs over the response time or the throughput. A prototype of, what could be considered an autonomous system, is presented and tested over an installation of Globus Toolkit (GT4) and shows that we can greatly improve the performance of the original middleware by a factor of 30%. In this paper GT is used as an example but it could be added to any grid middleware.