SPECIFYING RESOURCES AND SERVICES IN METACOMPUTING ENVIRONMENTS

With a steadily increasing number of services, metacomputing is now ga ining importance in science and industry. Virtual organizations, auton omous agents, mobile computing services, and high-performance client-s erver applications are among the many examples of metacomputing servic es. For all of them, resource description plays a major role in organi zing access, use, and administration of the computing components and s oftware services. We present a generic Resource and Service Descriptio n (RSD) for specifying the hardware and software components of (meta-) computing environments. Its graphical interface allows metacomputer u sers to specify their resource requests. Its textual counterpart gives service providers the necessary flexibility to specify topology and p roperties of the available system and software resources. Finally, its internal object-oriented representation is used to link different res ource management systems and service tools. With these three represent ations, our generic RSD approach is a key component for building metac omputer environments. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserv ed.