A Mobile Multi-agent System for Distributed Computing

The paper describes a peer-to-peer distributed-computing platform based on mobile agents. The platform, called yaca, has been built on top of Aglets, a mobile-agent platform written in Java. Next to the client agents, which seek computational resources in a cluster, yaca consists of four agents, who manage the computers within a cluster. (1) The Directory Agent keeps track of the computers belonging to the cluster. These computers are called nodes. (2) The Weather Agent monitors the status of a node and (3) the Account Agent keeps track of the resources used by client agents. (4) The Controller Agent manages a single node. It controls the access to the node and it migrates client agents to other nodes in the cluster if the node becomes overloaded. The Controller Agent receives help from the Weather Agent and Account Agent to manage the node. Experiments showed that yaca brings little overhead. However, its load balancing algorithm has room for improvements.