GridWeaver is a Collaboration between EPCC; The School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh; and HP Laboratories, Bristol. Funded under the eScience Grid Core Programme with the name HPFabMan, this project investigated and proposed solutions to the problem of automating the configuration and management of Grid computing fabrics.

The goal of this project was to bring together relevant insights, experience and existing technologies from two different domains: configuration management for large-scale computing fabrics, and configuration, deployment and management of large-scale distributed applications. Expertise in the former comes from the system configuration toolkit known as LCFG. As well as forming the configuration infrastructure for the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, LCFG is currently being used on the testbeds for the European DataGRID. Expertise in the latter comes the HP Laboratories experimental testbed, SmartFrog, a framework for the development of configuration-driven systems.

The project initially established the requirements of 'next-generation' Grid/utility computing. It then assessed how well these (and other) technologies fit the requirements of 'next-generation' Grid/utility computing, to blend together their strengths to satisfy these requirements, and identified gaps. We then produced a prototype solution to some of the requirements, showing how the strengths of our technologies can address some of the basic issues.

The project lasted 12 months and ended on 31 July 2003. You can browse our deliverables.