Description of a Lightweight Bartering Grid Architecture

Automated resource exchange and negotiation between participants of a Virtual Organization, or Peers of a Peer-to-Peer Grid, is an important feature of Grid computing because it enables scalable cooperation between entities under separate administrative control. Automated negotiation and accounting of resource consumption have been studied, and market-based resource exchange methods have been proposed. However, there currently exist few simulators of resource exchange accounting or actual Grid middlewares supporting negotiation with automated resource usage accounting between separate entities. We propose a Lightweight Bartering Grid (LBG) architecture suitable to the development of Peer-to-Peer Grids based on bartering (i.e. automated and accounted resource exchange), where Peers model their environment. We present the LBG architecture as well as a simulator and a middleware under development that both instantiate it.