CIS: Current Status and Roadmap

CIS (Common Information Service) is an information service developed for UNICORE version 6 representing Grid resources in a unified manner. Its architecture leverages the SOA principles by loosely coupling the information provider from its consumer (aggregator in our case) and thereby exposing its functionality as WSDL document. This also enables a service provider to publish its resource information entities to the CIS registry or database and clients to discover the Grid resources via standard query mechanisms such as XPath and XQuery.

Main Entities

CIS-Core, also called aggregator: It is the main service, which aggregates the information from different CIPs at several UNICORE Sites and makes them available to authenticated clients via the UNICORE Command line Client (UCC). CIS pulls information from registered CIPs as an XML instance compliant with the GLUE2 schema, which is then stored and updated periodically.

CIP (Common Information Provider): It sits on the Service/Resource provider side and extracts resource information from the UNICORE service XNJS and its configuration file SimpleIDB and from the static information file cipdata.xml. From this it constructs a GLUE2 compliant XML document and exposes it for retrieval. On the other hand, CIS populates its resource database by calling the CIP web method GetGLUEInfo.

Current Functionality

Dynamic registration of CIPs, which are deployed at particular UNICORE sites

Management of a collection of CIPs and their respective information

UCC client support for invoking CIS and CIP operations

Google Maps interface

Web interface for viewing GLUE2 documents published by list of CIPs

Authorised access to CIS web methods. For example; registering a CIP is a privileged operation which shall not be invoked by normal users

Source code is available on source forge with full documentation

CIS is exploited in D-MON

The D-MON project aims to provide and integrated monitoring service for the German Grid Infrastructure D-Grid. Forschungszentrum Jülich deployed CIS to provide UNICORE Grid Resource Information in a GLUE2 format. The functionality defined in the last section is already being utilised in the D-MON project.

High-level Architecture

The figure below depicts the CIS components which are used in order to perform CIP registration and to search for resource information.

Developer contacts:

Ahmed Shiraz Memon

Publication

A.S. Memon, M.S. Memon, Ph. Wieder, B. Schuller
CIS: An Information Service based on the Common Information Model
Proceedings of 3rd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing, Bangalore, India, December, 2007, IEEE Computer Society, ISBN 0-7695-3064-8, pp. 465 - 472, Abstract