Service and resource discovery in cycle-sharing environments with a utility algebra

The Internet has witnessed a steady and widespread increase in available idle computing cycles and computing resources in general. Such available cycles simultaneously allow and foster the increase in development of existing and new computationally demanding applications, driven by algorithm complexity, intensive data processing, or both. Available cycles may be harvested from several scenarios, ranging from college or office LANs, cluster, grid and utility or cloud computing infrastructures, to peer-to-peer overlay networks. Existing resource discovery protocols have a number of shortcomings for the existing variety of cycle sharing scenarios. They either (i) were designed to return only a binary answer stating whether a remote computer fulfills the requirements, (ii) rely on centralized schedulers (or coherently replicated) that are impractical in certain environments such as peer-to-peer computing, (iii) they are not extensible as it is impossible to define new resources to be discovered and evaluated or new ways to evaluate them. In this paper we present a novel, extensible, expressive, and flexible requirement specification algebra and resource discovery middleware. Besides standard resources (CPU, memory, network bandwidth,...), application developers may define new resource requirements and new ways to evaluate them. Application programmers can write complex requirements (that evaluate several resources) using fuzzy logic operators. Each resource evaluation (either standard or specially coded) returns a value between 0.0 and 1.0 stating the capacity to (partially) fulfill the requirement, considering client-specific utility depreciation (i.e., partial-utility, a downgraded measure of how the user assesses the available resources) and policies for combined utility evaluation. By comparing the values obtained from the various hosts, it is possible to precisely know which ones best fulfill each client´s needs, regarding a set of required resources.