SmartGRID: A Fully Decentralized Grid Scheduling Framework Supported by Swarm Intelligence

Resource management and scheduling has proven to be one of the key topics for grid computing. Nowadays, the resource management field is subdivided into low-level and high-level approaches. While low-level resource management systems normally concern the scheduling activities within a single virtual organization, high-level schedulers focus on the large scale resources utilization with unstable resource availability, low reliability networks, multi-policies, multi-administrative domains, etc. In this paper, we propose a decentralized framework named SmartGRID to tackle high-level grid resource management and scheduling. Within the SmartGRID framework, swarm intelligence algorithms are used for resource discovery and monitoring, standard protocols and schemes are adopted for scheduler interoperability, and an embedded plugin mechanism is provided to utilize multi-type external scheduling strategies. With a clearly decoupled layered architecture, SmartGRID has been designed to be a generic and modular environment to support intelligent and interoperable grid resource management upon a volatile, dynamics, and heterogeneous grid computing infrastructure.