Introduction
The Globus Project has been actively working on integrating Quality of Service (QoS) into Globus. While our work has been within the context of the Globus, it only lightly relies on Globus, and we believe that our work has wide applicability.
Our goals include:
- Providing a flexible architecture that can provide quality of service for different types of resources, including netwroks, CPUs, batch job schedulers, disks, and graphic pipelines.
- Providing mechanisms to allow both advance reservations and immediate ("right now") reservations for quality of service.
- Enabling high-performance computing users to conveniently make and use QoS reservations for complex sets of resources. For example, a scientific application may want to request nodes on a supercomputer, guaranteed access to disks on that supercomputer, real-time scheduling on a remote visualization computer, and guaranteed network bandwidth between the two.
We have developed an implementation that we call the General-purpose Architecture for Reservation and Allocation (GARA). We believe the GARA fulfills all of the above goals.
GARNET is our testbed for experimenting with the GARA architecture and various QoS mechanisms. We are currently using three Cisco routers generously provided by Cisco Systems, and numerous computers are attached to the testbed. While we have mostly done low-level networking QoS tests, we are beginning to work with real applications, and we already have one notable test story: see below.
What's New?
| 29-Sep-99: | First successful inter-domain video demo between LBNL and ANL using ESnet's NGI testbed. |
| 24-Aug-99: | We distributed our first early-adopters release of GARA to interested parties. |
| 17-Sep-99: | We did our first demo, providing QoS to an application sending audio and video over our GARNET testbed. |
More Information
| GARA: | Our Quality of Service architecture |
| GARNET: | Our Quality of Service testbed |
| Papers: | We have several papers and presentations discussing GARA and GARNET. |
| People: | Many people have been instrumental in creating GARA and GARNET |
| Globus: | The Globus Toolkit has been instrumental in developing and depoloying GARA |
If you would like to contact the GARA developers, please feel free to send us email at: gara-info@mcs.anl.gov.
Last updated on: 21-Jun-2000