An Agent Federations Based Infrastructure for Grid Monitoring and Discovery

The purpose of grid is to implement flexible, secure, coordinated resource sharing among dynamic collections of individuals, institutions, and resources. Thus how to monitor and discovery (M&D) the dynamic individuals, institutions, and resources efficiently becomes one of the most complicated problem. Agent technology focuses on the development of concepts, methodologies, and algorithms for autonomous problem solvers that can act flexibly in uncertain and dynamic environments in order to achieve their objectives. We can therefore take advantage of the flexibility and autonomy of agent technology to solve the above mentioned problem. This paper proposes an agent federations (AF) based infrastructure for grid monitoring and discovery (AFBIGMD). AFBIGMD adopts AF as the basic unit of grid M&D and multi-federations from different domains as the whole grid´s M&D system. Due to the distributed architecture and agent´s mobility, AFBIGMD cannot only implement grid´s M&D flexibly, but also relieve the network load efficiently. In addition, AFBIGMD avoids the bottleneck caused by single registry center, and is more steady and reliable