Hierarchical resource management in the Polder Metacomputing Initiative

A metacomputer is a set of computing resources, heterogeneous in many respects, turned into a single, uniformly accessible, computing environment. In such a system, the workload of highly demanding parallel applications that run alongside less demanding ones, has to be balanced. In the Polder Initiative we design and experiment with methods that are essential in this field. The modular structure of our metacomputer facilitates the exploration of fundamental research issues associated with load sharing and balancing, task migration, remote access, etc. In this paper we present our work in progress on a hierarchical approach in resource management (RM) for wide-area metacomputing.