A dynamic two-level priority based authentication system for job scheduling in a heterogeneous grid environment

摘要

The Grid environment is highly dynamic in nature where a variety of users from all over the world try to access the resources that are again distributed all over. Both the users and resources are highly varied. The users can be both valid and invalid, can have single job or multiple jobs, and can have jobs that can have different processing requirements, may be an old loyal user or may be a new one. Similarly the resources can have different characteristics like the processing speed, number of processing elements each resource has, whether the resources have joined or left the grid and so on. In such an environment if an un-authorized user is allowed to access the resource, there is a security threat to the grid. Even if one unauthorized user is allowed to access the grid; the whole grid becomes susceptible to many security threats. So resources should only be available to authorized users. Moreover, as number of users and their jobs increases, they face a lot of competition amongst themselves to get access to the resources. In order to solve the conflicts the resources must be allocated to the users by some arbitration mechanism. In this paper we propose a grid framework that focusses on solving these two major problems namely authentication and arbitration by means of using a robust authentication mechanism and by assigning priority to users and their jobs. In order to achieve secure resource allocation to valid user jobs for maximum resource utilization along with minimizing waiting time and elapsed time of jobs, a secure resource allocation scheme using ECC algorithm with two-level priority has been proposed. The results have been compared with a non-priority based system and our proposed system shows substantial improvement in both waiting time and elapsed time of jobs with better resource utilization.