Virtual organizations (VOs), communities that enable coordinated resource sharing among multiple sites, are becoming more prevalent in the high-performance computing community. In order to promote cross-site resource usability, most VOs prepare service agreements that include a minimum set of common resource functionality, starting with a common software stack and evolving into more complicated service and interoperability agreements. VO service agreements are often difficult to verify and maintain, however, because the sites are dynamic and autonomous. Automated verification of service agreements is critical: manual and user tests are not practical on a large scale.The Inca test harness and reporting framework is a generic system for the automated testing, data collection, verification, and monitoring of service agreements. This paper describes Inca's architecture, system impact, and performance. Inca is being used by the TeraGrid project to verify software installations, monitor service availability, and collect performance data.

The primary goal in the creation of Grids is to provide unified and coherent access to distributed computing, data storage and analysis, instruments, and other resources to advance scientific exploration. Grids combine multiple complex and interdependent systems that span several administrative domains. This complexity poses challenges for both the administrators who build and maintain the Grid resources and the scientists who use them. While other Grid monitoring tools provide system-level information on the utilization of Grid resources, the Inca system provides userlevel Grid monitoring with periodic, automated user-level testing of the software and services required to support Grid operation. Inca can be used by Grid operators, system administrators, and application users to identify, analyze, and troubleshoot user-level Grid failures, thereby improving Grid stability. In this paper, we describe the new features of our current Inca release, Inca 2. We then describe the architecture of the Inca 2 system, in addition to use cases that describe two Inca 2 deployments in production environments.

-The NSF TeraGrid project has designed and constructed a federated integrated information service (IIS) to serve its capability publishing and discovery needs. This service has also proven helpful in automating TeraGrid's operational activities. We describe the requirements that motivated this work; IIS's system architecture, information architecture, and information content; processes that IIS currently supports; and how various layers of the system architecture are being used. We also review motivating use cases that have not yet been satisfied by IIS and outline approaches for future work.