Legion: Lessons Learned Building a Grid Operating System

A.S. Grimshaw, A. Natrajan
2005 Proceedings of the IEEE  
Legion was the first integrated grid middleware architected from first principles to address the complexity of grid environments. Just as a traditional operating system provides an abstract interface to the underlying physical resources of a machine, Legion was designed to provide a powerful virtual machine interface layered over the distributed, heterogeneous, autonomous, and fault-prone physical and logical resources that constitute a grid. We believe that without a solid, integrated,
more » ... g system-like grid middleware, grids will fail to cross the chasm from bleeding-edge supercomputing users to more mainstream computing. This paper provides an overview of the architectural principles that drove Legion, a high-level description of the system with complete references to more detailed explanations, and the history of Legion from first inception in August 1993 through commercialization. We present a number of important lessons, both technical and sociological, learned during the course of developing and deploying Legion.
doi:10.1109/jproc.2004.842764 fatcat:6zkmjw7xdbc3no5z6unnmgkdzy