Resource description in large scale heterogeneous resource federations

Resource Federations aim at providing access to information and communication technology (ICT) resources across the boundaries of administrative domains. This is of interest today as modern societies are concerned about ICT infrastructure energy consumption and need to improve the way ICT resources are provisioned and maintained. This paper describes a concept and prototype implementation for resource federations to overcome resource and implementation heterogeneity in order to allow easy resource provisioning and control. This is achieved by defining a Resource Adaptor Description Language (RADL) that allows Domain Managers and higher layer orchestration logic to control heterogeneous resources abstracting from programming languages and implementation paradigms. The prototype has been evaluated by deploying RADL within the Panlab federation. The paper summarizes our experiences and outlines the most important results.