Interoperability in Heterogeneous Resource Federations

Currently, a number of research activities worldwide focus on resource federations to enable remote resource access and the setup of large scale experiments. With the global efforts in sharing experimental facility resources across organizational boundaries, interoperability issues are becoming increasingly important. To this end, this paper describes a model that defines the necessary entities for inter resource federation scenarios. The model is then discussed by means of a concrete use case federating Panlab and PlanetLab resources. In this respect Panlab and PlanetLab are considered to be federations themselves. Our findings show that the two approaches can be matched following the general model. This allows for federating resources not only across the boundaries of administrative (organizational) domains but even across the boundaries of federations. Those federations in themselves provide collections of resources offered by several administrative domains and use different control frameworks to enable resource access and management.