User-oriented job management in a grid environment

In a grid environment, job management is an important issue, and efforts can be made to improve its efficiency, flexibility, convenience and security. This paper presents a user-oriented job management with detailed design and implementation. The proposed job management has the advantages of reusability of job definition, flexibility and automation of file operations. The job management uses a workflow mode, that is, the whole management is divided into several separate steps. A job management wizard is designed to conduct each step. Therefore, what the grid user needs to do is to define the job by constructing necessary information at runtime. In order to save the memory and manage the jobs better the job management adopts a two-level storage method. The first level stores the job index information, while the second keeps detailed information of the job in an XML file. Our experiments show that this approach is user friendly and job reusable.