Archived: 21 January 2009
Published in Proc of APAC'07, Perth, Oct 2007.
The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) National Grid needs an information system that will provide information about compute and data resources that users or Grid applications can use. Most production Grids using the Globus Toolkit are still using LDAP based information systems like gLite's Berkeley Database Information Index (BDII) and the now deprecated Monitoring and Discovery Service 2 (MDS2) of the Globus Toolkit 2. However, most of the Grid applications on the APAC National Grid are based on web services and Globus Toolkit 4 (GT4), so a move to the Monitoring and Discovery Service 4 (MDS4), which is a web service based information system, was needed. We faced a number of problems in implementing this system because the existing middleware and standards had integration issues and did not meet all of our requirements. In this paper we discuss the design and implementation of the information system for the Australian National Grid and how we addressed the issues we faced in deploying the system.