GridICE GlueDomains HOWTO
This document illustrates how to join the GridICE GlueDomains
experimental deployment: this will enable the publication of network
characteristics from your domain to other domains already included
in that experiment.
Something you should know about GlueDomains domains
The basic GlueDomains concept is to partition the Grid services
into Domains, and to monitor only (and possibly all)
inter-domain paths. The result of such monitoring activity are
published using Globus MDS, and rendered through the GridICE toolset.
For these data to be useful, the domain administrator must ensure
the following critical requirement:
- the network infrastructure within the domain does not exhibit
bottlenecks with respect to the information flow from/to the outside.
Such requirement should fail, the internal infrastructure might
fall into congestion, which will be visible at end-to-end level.
A generic domain contains two kinds of GlueDomains functionalities:
- one or more theodolites, that perform the monitoring activity;
- one infoprovider, that gathers information from theodolites and
uploads that data to the MDS.
There is also a server, which contains a centralized
description of the whole GlueDomains system, and is used mainly for
configuration purposes.
You will probably want to setup one or more hosts running
theodolites, and one infoprovider. The following steps should bring to
a startup configuration of your GlueDomains domain:
- identify your domain and its borders (keeping into account the
"requirement" above);
- allocate a host, adjacent to a border router, to support
theodolites: a dedicated host is OK, but also a lightly loaded one may
be appropriate (see Theodolite Support
Installation);
- send to Augusto or to Alessandro an
(human readable) email indicating the IP address (the FQHN is not of
interest) of the host(s) that supports theodolite functionality. You
will shortly receive a "welcome aboard" reply.
- allocate a host for infoprovider support: one privileged
candidate is a GRIS. Also, theodolite support and infoprovider may
coexist on the same host (see
Infoprovider Support
Installation);
- configure the host(s), using the guidelines in:
- complete the configuration with the information received with the
"welcome aboard" reply.
The configuration can be tuned further. For instance the most
common cases might be:
- split your domain into two (if a bottleneck arises within your
original domain),
- allocate further hosts as theodolites, if your domain uses
several links to reach other domains,
Augusto Ciuffoletti