Resource Allocation in Grid Computing: An Economic Model

Grid scheduling, that is, the allocation of distributed computational resources to user applications, is one of the most challenging and complex task in Grid computing. The problem of allocating resources in Grid scheduling requires the definition of a model that allows local and external schedulers to communicate in order to achieve an efficient management of the resources themselves. To this aim, some economic/market-based models have been introduced in the literature, where users, external schedulers, and local schedulers negotiate to optimize their objectives. In this paper, we propose a tender/contract-net model for Grid resource allocation, showing the interactions among the involved actors. The performance of the proposed market-based approach is experimentally compared with a round-robin allocation protocol. Key–Words: Grid computing, Resource Management, Economic models, Scheduling, Simulation