Special equipment, capacities, architectures, and policies

Platforms on the grid will often have different architectures, operating systems, devices, capacities, and equipment. Each of these items represents a different kind of resource that the grid can use as criteria for assigning jobs to machines.

While some software may be available on several architectures, for example, PowerPC and x86, such software is often designed to run only on a particular type of hardware and operating system. Such attributes must be considered when assigning jobs to resources in the grid.

In some cases, the administrator of a grid may create a new artificial resource type that is used by schedulers to assign work according to policy rules or other constraints. For example, some machines may be designated to only be used for medical research. These would be identified as having a medical research attribute and the scheduler could be configured to only assign jobs that require machines of the medical research resource. Others may participate in the grid only if they are not used for military purposes. In this situation, jobs requiring a military resource would not be assigned to such machines. Of course, the administrators would need to impose a classification on each kind of job through

some certification procedure to use this kind of approach.