Agent Based Resource Management in Computational Grids
Friday, 27th July 2001
0930 - 1100
Computer Science, RMIT
Abstract:
"The ``Grid'' is an emerging infrastructure that connects multiple
regional and national resources to create a universal source of
computing power -- the word ``Grid'' was chosen by analogy with
the [electric] power grid, which provides pervasive access to
electrical power. We believe that by providing pervasive, dependable,
consistent and inexpensive access to advanced computational
capabilities,
databases, sensors, and people, computational grids will have a
transforming effect similar to the electric power grid, allowing
new classes of applications to emerge."
(Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman [Foster99])
Computational Grids are an important new research area which
combine aspects of applications and computer science. The Computational
Grid community draws its analogies from the electricity (power) Grid,
whereby computational resources can be shared based on demand.
I present two themes in this talk to enable the agent based paradigm
to support resource management in discovery in Computational Grids.
1. How can an agent based design paradigm support the establishment
of Grid environments.
A de-centralised approach to resource management and discovery,
based on a community of interacting software agents is described.
Each agent either represents a user application, a resource, or a
MatchMaking service. The proposed approach can support dynamic
registration of resources and user tasks, facilitating the establishment
of dynamic clusters. Resource capability and task requirements are
described using an object based data model, enabling new types of
devices
or new features in existing devices to be identified. A comparison with
the Discovery and LookUp services in Jini and TSpaces is also provided.
2. Supporting a large number of resource -- what are the issues in
supporting Scalability in the system outlined in theme 1
Scalability is an issue that becomes important when developing practical
software agent systems, or when comparing infrastructure to implement
multi-agent systems. Scalability is crucial in the context of
Computational
Grids, where agents may wrap or manage different kinds of resources,
with
different characteristics. It is important for an application developer,
for
instance, to be able to identify aspects of an agent system that may
prevent scaling beyond a certain number of agents or users. Scalability
is also a term that has been applied in different contexts in the
agents community, and due to diversity of approaches in the field, can
imply different things. Multi-agent scalability must take into account
themes which are specific to agent systems, such as co-ordination and
communication between agents, behaviour of each agent, and higher level
structures such as agent organisation, and the emergence of such
structures
through collective behaviours of participants. It is also important to
be able to measure and compare agent systems, for specific applications,
to be able to dete rmine whether one of these has attributes which
support scalability. I outline scalability metrics that may be
used to compare two agent designs to identify which one could be
`more' scalable than another.
Biosketch:
Omer Rana is a lecturer in computer science at Cardiff University, and
currently visiting Lin Padgham, James Harland and Michael Winikoff at
RMIT. He holds a PhD from Imperial College (London University), and
has worked in projects at Argonne National Laboratory (US), Oak Ridge
National
Laboratory (US), BT Labs, and the University of Syracuse (US). He is
also actively involved in Grid activities via the Global Grid Forum
where
he co-chairs a working group, and is co-founder of the regional Grid
centre at
Cardiff University (one of 8 in the UK). His research interests are in
high performance distributed computing and multi-agent systems.
REFERENCES:
[foster99]
I. Foster and C. Kesselman,
The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999
More details of theme 1 can be found in:
``Resource Discovery for Dynamic Clusters in Computational Grids''
Omer F. Rana, Daniel Bunford-Jones, David W. Walker, Matthew Addis, Mike
Surridge and Ken Hawick
Proceedings of ``Heterogeneous Computing Workshop'' at IPDPS/SPDP,
San Francisco, California (April 2001).
More details of theme 2 can be found in:
``What We Mean When We Talk About Multi-Agent Scalability''
Omer F. Rana and Kate Stout,
Proceedings of Autonomous Agents Conference 2000, Barcelona,
Spain. ACM Press