Towards Uniform and Transparent Access to the Grid Information Using the Palantir

Grids allow large scale resource-sharing across different administrative domains. Those diverse resources are likely to join or quit the Grid at any moment or possibly to break down. Grid monitoring tools have to adapt supporting access information to these heterogeneous and not reliable environments. There is a wide rage of types of resources to be monitored or entities, with different nature, characteristics and so on. These issues make the task of gathering Grid information complex to treat, and it is difficult to provide a generals ways for accessing to all this information. In this paper we propose a set of functionalities that a Grid Information System should provide. We describe the Palantir meta-information system that has been designed for uniform the access to different monitoring and information systems and that implements all the discussed functionalities. Moreover, we present real examples that state how Palantir has been integrated providing the uniform. access to systems with heterogeneous information providers.