Automating Provisioning of Complete Software Stack in a Grid Environment

Abstract

With scaling of data centers, clusters, and grids, it is going to be increasingly difficult to download, configure, install, update, and manage the software stack on the constituent nodes. Automation of this process is needed for the system to scale beyond a few hundred nodes. We present system architecture for a middleware service that performs this task in an automated manner. We propose that our architecture can be implemented as a grid service as part of the globus toolkit. Furthermore, we demonstrate the usefulness of the architecture through a prototype implementation which automates the whole process by integrating various existing solutions along with building intelligence into the middleware to handle such tasks.