Design of a Configurable Auction Server for Resource Allocation in Grid

Large scale systems such as the Grid need scalable and efficient resource allocation mechanisms to fulfil the requirements of its participants and applications while the whole system is regulated to work efficiently. Economics inspired models have shown to efficiently allocate resources and services, scaling up well as they are decentralized. However most of existing implementations rely on a single market mechanism as a mean to handle resource allocation. Besides, in most of those approaches the allocation mechanism itself is neither flexible nor configurable, mostly designed for specific purposes such as scheduling one type of tasks. Nowadays, Grids are heterogeneous systems composed of multiple cohabitating resources and applications. Such heterogeneity requires complex mechanisms and usually cannot be achieved by a single type of allocation mechanism. Therefore, we aim to develop a generic approach to resource allocation in Grids able to support multiple cohabitating auctions. We claim that resource allocation frameworks may deal with heterogeneity by means of flexibility and configurability and they have to provide functionalities by which the allocation mechanism should be configured and adapted to application requirements and resource providers needs. This paper presents a configurable auction server architecture that enables dynamic configuration of markets so as to adapt them to the requirement of their initiators.