A new approach on network resources management in Grids

Currently, Grid applications are usually developed for a network offering only a best effort packet delivery service. Nevertheless, High Performance Computing applications with Quality of Service requirements stress the capabilities of the interconnecting network of the target Grid infrastructure. Therefore, the application runtime environment must interact, through a Grid Resource Broker, with a Network Resource Manager to obtain information about the network and to reserve network resources among the computational resources that will host the execution of the applications. The paper presents the design and the development of a Grid Network-Aware Resource Broker. It enhances the features of a Grid Resource Broker with the capabilities provided by a Network Resource Manager. The innovative contribution of the presented integration is the possibility to design and implement new mapping/scheduling mechanisms to take into account both network and computational resources. Finally, we will show how to exploit the new features offered by the Grid Network-Aware Resource Broker in scheduling parallel applications with QoS requirements.