A directory service for configuring high-performance distributed computations

Conference · Fri Aug 01 04:00:00 EDT 1997

OSTI ID:508115

Fitzgerald, S; Kesselman, C ^[1]; Foster, I ^[2]

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1. Univ. of Southern California, Marina del Rey, CA (United States). Information Sciences Institute
2. Argonne National Lab., IL (United States); and others

High-performance execution in distributed computing environments often requires careful selection and configuration not only of computers, networks, and other resources but also of the protocols and algorithms used by applications. Selection and configuration in turn require access to accurate, up-to-date information on the structure and state of available resources. Unfortunately, no standard mechanism exists for organizing or accessing such information. Consequently, different tools and applications adopt ad hoc mechanisms, or they compromise their portability and performance by using default configurations. We propose a Metacomputing Directory Service that provides efficient and scalable access to diverse, dynamic, and distributed information about resource structure and state. We define an extensible data model to represent required information and present a scalable, high-performance, distributed implementation. The data representation and application programming interface are adopted from the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol; the data model and implementation are new. We use the Globus distributed computing toolkit to illustrate how this directory service enables the development of more flexible and efficient distributed computing services and applications.

• Research Organization: Argonne National Lab., IL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Research, Washington, DC (United States); Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Arlington, VA (United States)
• DOE Contract Number: W-31109-ENG-38
• OSTI ID: 508115
• Report Number(s): ANL/MCS/P--622-0597; CONF-970835--4; ON: DE97007027; CNN: Contract N66001-96-C-8523
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
COMPUTER NETWORKS
DISTRIBUTED DATA PROCESSING
EFFICIENCY
PERFORMANCE