[GE users] global (WAN) resource tracking?

[Rod.Rebello at Microchip.com]

Hi,

We have remote site SGE grids in place and want to have users at those 
sites be able to submit jobs that use wide-area network (WAN) licenses for 
various software packages.  The WAN licenses are accessible to all sites, 
but have to be tracked so only the amount available are used across all 
sites.  The software will run at the local site where the job is submitted 
and checkout a WAN license from a usually remote server (can both be at 
same site).

Basically all grid installations have to be aware when a WAN license 
resource is in use so they are not over allocated.

Our current solution is to have all remote sites submit dummy jobs to a 
"master" grid that tracks WAN resource usage.  The job will only execute 
at the remote site when the dummy job is successfully executing on the 
master with the allocated license resource.  The master job terminates 
when the remote job completes, thereby returning the license resource. 
While this mostly works, it is fairly cumbersome and error prone.

Is there a better way to handle this?   Ideally, I would like to have a 
concept of local and global resources.  Local resources are only known by 
the local grid site, and global resources are shared and tracked across 
sites.

I have looked at the TOG project (transfer-queue over globus) but this 
solves a different problem.  We don't need to submit jobs to remote grid 
sites through firewalls.  We can already do this through our internal WAN, 
which is essentially how we have implemented our current solution.

Thanks for any advice.

- Rod

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Rod Rebello
Director of CAD 
Microchip Technology Inc.
480-792-7502