A meta-scheduling service for co-allocating arbitrary types of resources

The Grid paradigm implies the sharing of a variety of resources across multiple administrative domains. In order to execute a work-flow using these distributed resources an instrument is needed to co-allocate resources by reaching agreements with the different local scheduling systems involved. Apart from compute resources to execute the work-flow the co-ordinated usage of other resource types must be also guaranteed, as there are for example a network connectivity with dedicated QoS parameters or a visualisation device. We present a Web Service-based MetaScheduling Service which allows to negotiate a common time slot with local resource management systems to enable the execution of a distributed work-flow. The successful negotiation process results in a formal agreement based on the WS-Agreement recommendation that is currently specified by the GRAAP working group of the Global Grid Forum. As a use case we demonstrate the integration of this MetaScheduling Service into the UNICORE middleware.