On-demand synthesis of grid activities can play a significant role in automatic workflow composition and in improving quality of the grid resource provisioning. However, in the grid, synthesis of activities has been largely ignored due to the limited expressiveness of the representation of activity capabilities and the lack of adapted resource management means to take advantage of such activity synthesis. This paper introduces a new mechanism for automatic synthesis of available activities in the grid by applying ontology rules. Rule-based synthesis combines multiple primitive activities to form new compound activities. The synthesized activities can be provisioned as new or alternative options for negotiation as well as advance reservation. This is a major advantage compared to other approaches that only focus on resource matching and brokerage. Furthermore, the new synthesized activities provide aggregated capabilities that otherwise may not be possible, leading towards an automatic generation of grid workflows. We developed a prototype to demonstrate advantages of our approach.

In this paper we present an extension to devise and implement advance reservation as part of the scheduling and resource management services of the ASKALON Grid application development and runtime environment. The scheduling service has been enhanced to offer a list of resources that can execute a specific task and to negotiatewith the resource manager about resources capable of processing tasks in the shortest possible time. We introduce progressive reservation approach which tries to allocate resources based on a fair-share principle. Experiments are shown that demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, and that reflect different QoS parameters including performance, predictability, resource usage and resource fairness.

Advance reservation of Grid resources can play a key role in enabling Grid middleware to deliver on-demand resource provision with significantly improved Quality-of-Service (QoS). However, in the Grid, advance reservation has been largely ignored due to the dynamic Grid behavior, under-utilization concerns, multi-constrained applications, and lack of support for agreement enforcement. These issues force the Grid middleware to make resource allocations at runtime with reduced QoS. To remedy these, we introduce a new, 3-layered negotiation protocol for advance reservation of the Grid resources. We model resource allocation as an on-line strip packing problem and introduce a new mechanism that optimizes resource utilization and QoS constraints while generating the contention-free solutions. The mechanism supports open reservations to deal with the dynamic Grid and provides a practical solution for agreement enforcement. We have implemented a prototype and performed experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

Resource management is a key concern for implementing effective Grid middleware and shielding application developers from low level details. Existing resource managers concentrate mostly on physical resources. However, some advanced Grid programming environments allow application developers to specify Grid application components at high level of abstraction which then requires an effective mapping between high level application description (activity types) and actual deployed software components (activity deployments). This paper describes GLARE framework that provides dynamic registration, automatic deployment and on-demand provision of application components (activities) that can be used to build Grid applications. GLARE simplifies description and presentation of both activity types and deployments so that they can easily be located in the Grid and thus become available on-demand. GLARE has been implemented based on a super-peer model with support for activity leasing, self management, and fault tolerance. Experiments are shown to reflect the effectiveness of the GLARE.