Grid software components

Larger grids may have a hierarchical or other type of organizational topology usually matching the connectivity topology. That is, machines locally connected together with a LAN form a cluster of machines. The grid may be organized in a hierarchy consisting of clusters of clusters. The work involved in managing the grid is distributed to increase the scalability of the grid. The collection and grid operation and resource data as well as job scheduling is distributed to match the topology of the grid. For example, a central job scheduler will not schedule a submitted job directly to the machine that is to execute it. Instead, the job is sent to a lower level scheduler that handles a set of machines (or further clusters).

The lower level scheduler handles the assignment to the specific machine. Similarly, the collection of statistical information is distributed. Lower level clusters receive activity information from the individual machines, aggregate it, and send it to higher level management nodes in the hierarchy.