A policy-based hierarchical approach for management of grids and networks

Grids are distributed infrastructures that have been used as an important and powerful resource for distributed computing. Since the nodes of a grid can potentially be located in different administrative domains, the underlying network infrastructure that supports grid communications has to be properly configured to provide efficient node-to-node message exchange. Currently, the management of grids and networks is performed by different and independent tools: there is no tool integration to provide, for example, an automatic network configuration. This forces grids administrators to request, in a non-automated fashion, the configuration of network devices to network administrators. In this paper we present a policy translation mechanism that generates network policies from grid requirements expressed in grid policies. The paper also presents a prototype tool that allows grid administrators to define grid policies, and network administrators to define corresponding translation rules. The proposed translation mechanism and its implementation in the associated tool show that the management of grids and networks can be executed in an integrated way.