International Symposium on Grid Computing (ISGC 2007) Page 1 March 26-29, 2007 at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan Characteristics of a Novel Grid Resource Broker cum Meta-Scheduler Asvija B, Shamjith K.V., Henry Sukumar, Sridharan R, Mohanram N, and Prahlada Rao {asvijab, shamjithkv, henrys, rsridharan, mohan, prahladab}@cdacb.ernet.in Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Bangalore, India Abstract Modern Service Oriented Grids seamlessly integrate huge sets of distributed, heterogeneous resources that are spread across different administrative and business domains. The authors, in this paper bring out the characteristics of a Novel Grid Broker cum Meta-Scheduler that efficiently manages and harnesses resources in the grids. The requirements of this Federated & Autonomous Resource Management System include handling policy enforcements of Resources, Jobs and Users, addressed at Grid / Community / Site / Individual resource levels. It addresses the requirements with respect to Administrative, User, and Community (Virtual Organization) views. It highlights the requirements from an Application / Domain specific perspective, for maximizing the throughput through fine-tuning and optimizing communication and data storage patterns. The requirements are abstracted for various resource types like Compute, Storage, Data, Memory, Network, and Software in a grid. The need of a Descriptive Language (to formulate these requirements in an unambiguous manner), using Request-Response model is also presented. The features of the popular meta-schedulers available today are compared. Introduction Modern grid infrastructures house very large sets of heterogeneous resources that are widely distributed over geographical locations and administrative domains [13] [14] . This heterogeneity and distributed nature of resources necessitate for an efficient management system that can aid in their optimum utilization. Nevertheless, such a system has to face new challenges that are unique to this realm. Hence, understanding these challenges becomes extremely important in our endeavor of building successful Grid infrastructures. In this paper, we begin with the discussions on the broader goals of a Resource Broker cum Scheduler. The following sections list the expectations from a general user’s perspective and administrator’s perspective of the system. A detailed analysis of each of these requirements is presented. Finally, a short discussion is given on the popular Grid brokers and schedulers in the market. Broader Goals At a broader level, it can be seen that any such system is expected to achieve the following goals. These goals form the basic requirements of the complex system.