Enforcing resource sharing agreements among distributed server clusters

Future scalable, high throughput, and high performance applications are. likely to execute on platforms constructed by clustering multiple autonomous distributed servers, with resource access governed by agreements between the owners and users of these servers. Such systems raise several new resource management challenges, chief amongst which is the enforcement of agreements to ensure that, despite the distributed nature of both requests and resources, user requests only receive a predetermined share of the aggregate resource. Current solutions only enforce such agreements at a coarse granularity and in a centralized fashion, limiting their applicability. This paper presents an architecture for the distributed enforcement of resource sharing agreements. Our approach exploits a uniform application-independent representation of agreements, and combines it with efficient tune-window based coordinated queuing algorithms running on multiple nodes. We have successfully implemented this general strategy in two different network layers: a Layer-7 HTTP redirector and a Layer-4 IP packet redirector; which redirect connection requests from distributed clients to a cluster of distributed servers. Our measurements of both implementations verify that our approach is general and effective.