A.11 Case Study: Virtual Grids

Overview

An application requires co-allocation of resource types which cannot be located in any single cluster. Further, these resources, once allocated, must be dynamically provisioned and turned into temporary 'service' nodes. Node availability must be queriable and managed under both basic and urgent priority models.

As an independent request, two unrelated grids would like to be able to share resorces between them in heavy load situations. However, each grid uses a different software stack and the shared nodes would need to be either truly reprovisioned or virtually reprovisioned to be of value.

Solution

Moab provides the ability to perform distributed co-allocation queries with per-request urgency factors. With this information, Moab can identify optimal resource allocations throughout a grid across multiple independent clusters. Using co-allocation advance reservation, Moab can guarantee these resources will be available at the same time. Finally, with reservation triggers and the native resource manager interface, Moab can dynamically customize these nodes as service nodes for the application and reprovision them to standard compute nodes when the application is complete.

The same technology can be used to manage inter-grid queries, reservation, allocation, and provisioning.