A Case for Cooperative and Incentive-Based Coupling of Distributed Clusters

Interest in grid computing has grown significantly over the past five years. Management of distributed cluster resources is a key issue in grid computing. Central to management of resources is the effectiveness of resource allocation, as it determines the overall utility of the system. In this paper, we propose a new grid system that consists of grid federation agents which couple together distributed cluster resources to enable a cooperative environment. The agents use a computational economy methodology, that facilitates QoS scheduling, with a cost-time scheduling heuristic based on a scalable, shared federation directory. We show by simulation, while some users that are local to popular resources can experience higher cost and/or longer delays, the overall users´ QoS demands across the federation are better met. Also, the federation´s average case message passing complexity is seen to be scalable, though some jobs in the system may lead to large numbers of messages before being scheduled