2.6 Tight Integration with Customer Resources

From an end-user's point of view, tight integration means the utility computing resources are available with little or no knowledge of their location or configuration. They appear to be an extension of currently available local resources. That is, they are there, and they work. From an infrastructure point of view, however, tight integration can mean many different things depending on the utility service model used.

2.6.1 Batch Level Utility Computing Resource Integration

In a batch service, local workload should be submitted to the batch system and should be able to run either locally or remotely based on resource availability and interconnect speed. It is the responsibility of the customer's batch system to seamlessly integrate these resources into a single virtual resource available to the end-user. Moab provides this service and allows end-users to continue submitting jobs to the local queue regardless of where the jobs will ultimately run. This allows organizations to use utility computing resources with no training and no job modification.

There are several key aspects to enabling this level of tight integration, which include the following:

• Integration between customer and utility computing batch system tools
• Customization of utility computing resources to provide similar batch environment
  • Queues, node features, policies, node ownership, and so forth
• Customization of utility computing resources to provide similar execution environment
  • Operating system, applications, directory structure, environment variables, etc
• Creation of compatible user and group credentials
• Automated job migration to utility computing environment
• Automated data migration between customer and utility computing hosting center
• Automated export of utility computing job and resource status information

If using Moab, these steps are all handled automatically. From a configuration point of view, only the connection to the utility computing master host need be established as shown in the following example:

RMCFG[ucmaster] server=moab://ucmaster.ucprovider.net:42110 flags=hostingcenter