An Information Service for Grid Virtual Organization: Architecture, Implementation and Evaluation

Information Service is the heart of the entire Grid software infrastructure. It maintains various information in a Grid environment, and provides this information to users on request. We present an Information Service architecture for information capturing, aggregation, and provisioning in a Grid Virtual Organization (VO). This Information Service is a hierarchical structure which consists of VO layer, site layer and resource layer. The architecture defines downloadable and pluggable information sensors for portability and flexibility of information capturing. The meta-data mechanism is incorporated into our Information Service for information organization and management. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the Information Service, and the results show that the Information Service presents satisfactory scalability with number of users and number of information amount. Our Information Service has been implemented based on the Globus Toolkit as a Grid service compliant to the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) specifications.