Resource Broker

Many of the resources involved in typical AST requests are likely to have limited availability. Because of the demands on these resources, control systems, i.e. resource brokers, will control the accessibility to resources. In fact, some of the control system may not be automated and the availability of a resource has to be approved manually.

The resource brokers should have information including the resource details, its schedule, user policies on the usage of the resource. The reservation, management and authentication of resources are beyond the scope of AST_master. However, AST_master should learn enough for a resources in order to run preliminary processing. Then, Resource Brokers are the agents that AST_master contacts to identify and reserve resources prior to the actual instantiation of the AST. A reservation id will be given back to the AST_master if the resources are successfully located. As many other communications within ASTB, Resource Brokers use the TIP to interact with AST_master.

The development of resource brokers is out of the scope of ASTB implementation. Possible collaboration on resources and its associated brokers can be found in the GRID computing communities, e-science projects etc.