A Cost-Aware Resource Exchange Mechanism for Load Management across Grids

Numerous Grids have been created during the last years. Most of these Grids work in isolation and with different utilisation levels. As the resource utilisation within a Grid has fixed and operational costs, there can be benefits for a Grid to offload requests to another Grid or provide spare resources, thus reducing the cost of over-provisioning. In this work, we enable load management across Grids through resource exchange between them considering the cost for one Grid to acquire resources from another. However, enabling resource exchange amongst Grids is a challenging task: a Grid should not compromise the performance of its local user communities´ applications, yet benefit from providing spare resources to other Grids. The load management mechanism and related policies take into consideration the economic compensation of providers for the resources allocated. Experimental results show that the mechanism achieves its goal in redirecting requests, increasing the number of user requests accepted and balancing the load amongst Grids.