Using a grid: A user’s perspective

To improve the quality of a service, the user may arrange to reserve a set of resources in advance for his exclusive or high-priority use. A calendaring system analogy can be used here. Such a reservation system can also be used in conjunction with planned hardware or software maintenance events, when the affected resource might not be available for grid use.

In a scavenging grid, it may not be possible to reserve specific machines in advance. Instead, the grid management systems may allocate a larger fraction of its capacity for a given reservation to allow for the likelihood of some of the resources becoming unavailable. This must be done in conjunction with tools that have profiled the grid’s workload capacity sufficiently to have reliable statistics about the grid’s ability to serve the reservation.