We describe a system for creating personal clusters in user-space to support the submission and management of thousands of
compute-intensive serial jobs to the network-connected compute resources on the NSF TeraGrid. The system implements a robust
infrastructure that submits and manages job proxies across a distributed computing environment. These job proxies contribute
resources to personal clusters created dynamically for a user on-demand. The personal clusters then adapt to the prevailing
job load conditions at the distributed sites by migrating job proxies to sites expected to provide resources more quickly.
Furthermore, the system allows multiple instances of these personal clusters to be created as containers for individual scientific
experiments, allowing the submission environment to be customized for each instance. The version of the system described in
this paper allows users to build large personal Condor and Sun Grid Engine clusters on the TeraGrid. Users then manage their
scientific jobs, within each personal cluster, with a single uniform interface using the feature-rich functionality found
in these job management environments.
Keywords Cooperative systems - Distributed computing - Resource management