Toward an Interactive Grid Adaptive Resource Broker

This paper presents an approach used as a basis for interactive system adaptation in which Grid jobs are maintained at runtime. Most of the Grid research on Resource Broker assumes that the broker’s task, other than monitoring the job status, is over once the job has been submitted, i.e. the user submits the job to the broker or the scheduler and simply waits for the results. So far little attention has been given to interactive jobs. The idea for an interactive job running on the Grid is that the user may, for example, with the push of button, change an attribute of the job during run-time. Additionally the broker may migrate a job to another resource on behalf of the user, if the status of a resource changes significantly during run-time. An elegant solution, using a reflective technique, is proposed here. The benefit of a reflective technique is that it is easy to upgrade in order to adapt to changes in application requirements. It can also provide flexibility to customize policies dynamically to suit run-time environment and highlevel transparency to applications. The design of an Adaptive Resource Broker is described and experimentally evaluated. Results indicate that this approach enhances the likelihood of timely job completion in a dynamic Grid system.