Towards GLUE2: evolution of the computing element information model

A key advantage of Grid systems is the ability to share heterogeneous resources and services between traditional administrative and organizational domains. This ability enables virtual pools of resources to be created and assigned to groups of users. Resource awareness, the capability of users or user agents to have knowledge about the existence and state of resources, is required in order utilize the resource. This awareness requires a description of the services and resources typically defined via a community-agreed information model. One of the most popular information models, used by a number of Grid infrastructures, is the GLUE Schema, which provides a common language for describing Grid resources. Other approaches exist, however they follow different modeling strategies. The presence of different flavors of information models for Grid resources is a barrier for enabling inter-Grid interoperability. In order to solve this problem, the GLUE Working Group in the context of the Open Grid Forum was started. The purpose of the group is to oversee a major redesign of the GLUE Schema which should consider the successful modeling choices and flaws that have emerged from practical experience and modeling choices from other initiatives. In this paper, we present the status of the new model for describing computing resources as the first output from the working group with the aim of dissemination and soliciting feedback from the community.