Development of an In-House Grid Testbed Supporting Scheduling and Execution of Scientific Workflows

Abstract

Researchers working in Grid workflow scheduling need a real Grid environment to produce the results of experiments. However, many interested researchers of academic institutes may not be able to produce experimental results due to unavailability of a required testbed at their institutes. This article addresses an important challenge of developing an in-house Grid testbed that supports workflow scheduling and execution. This article proposes the architectural design of the in-house testbed and then concisely presents chosen software tools, their understanding, installation, configuration, and the testing related to the implementation of the testbed. Furthermore, the article also presents the methodology of performing experiments on the testbed. The in-house Grid testbed is implemented using open-source, freely available, and widely used software components. In addition, the testbed allows to produce a real Grid scenario of varying bandwidth values by emulating the network characteristics among the Grid-sites of the testbed. This article addresses testing of all the internal components of the testbed and their integrations for their proper working. This article also provides testing and demonstration of workflow scheduling and execution. We believe that this article can educate novice users about developing a Grid testbed. The presented Grid testbed can easily be replicated or adapted; furthermore, the presented deployment of the Grid testbed can guide to researchers for carrying out real experimentation for their research purposes.