A group of government, commercial and academic organizations in India partnered to form a shared collaboration and economic development grid. The resulting organization combined with a vision "to emerge as the premier R&D Institution for the design, development and deployment of world class IT solutions for economic and human advancement." The organization states that their grid will become India's largest grid in terms of computational power and availability.

Challenge

The organization started with eight initial clusters in the grid, and plans to grow the grid 10-fold in the next few years. Resources will initially be shared from 17 cities between approximately 40 to 60 organizations. The clusters have multiple operating systems including AIX, Solaris, and various Linux distributions. Resource managers include products such as LoadLeveler and TORQUE Resource Manager. Hardware also varies widely from cluster to cluster.

Because the collaboration and economic development grid has constantly evolving relationships with new consuming and hosting organizations, workload is unpredictable in terms of size, duration, topic, purpose and priority. Workload dependencies and optimizations will require a fine degree of intelligence, historical workload analysis, and fine-grained control.

Solution

The organization turned to Moab Grid Suite to unify management of its various, heterogeneous resources with central or shared administration. Moab made it possible for the organization to control and optimize resources on such a disparate grid environment. Furthermore, Moab’s management tools are simple and easy to learn, allowing partners to easily join. Moab’s political sharing features let the organization create a grid that satisfies the partners’ desire for access to the total project, while giving them sovereignty over their own clusters. The organization can use Moab to dynamically change the grid, giving them the freedom to easily add future-planned clusters and let other organizations freely join and leave the grid.

Benefits

Moab’s Web-based Access Portal let’s partners submit jobs from anywhere with a simple graphical interface that eliminates the complexity of a command line interface. But local users also have the option to use the resource management tools they are familiar with so no learning is lost. With Moab, the organization can take advantage of a unified, global view of separate resources to easily plan for workload, detect problems, and manage resources. Moab also simplifies management by dynamically adjusting workload & applying optimization intelligence effectively in complex environments, allocating jobs to the best resources and using hardware as efficiently as possible.

Moab made sharing resources less of a hassle for the organization’s partners with its political sharing tools.  Moab allows administrators to set shared rules for the entire grid, while individual partners can still set their own rules according to personal needs and preferences. Moab offers a boundless set of relationships and rule sets it can apply to let organizations make their own political and partnership decisions. Organization partners can use these relationship and rule sets to limit what resources are used, by whom, at what time and under which circumstances. Moab also lets the organization create an unlimited number of associated grid relationships with other individual sites or with other girds.  The organization can participate with organizations outside the original grid because of Moab’s dynamic relationship settings.