MAGDA: A Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture

Mobile agents mean both a technology and a programming paradigm. They allow for a flexible approach which can alleviate a number of issues present in distributed and Grid-based systems, by means of features such as migration, cloning, messaging and other provided mechanisms. In this paper we describe an architecture (MAGDA – Mobile Agent based Grid Architecture) we have designed and we are currently developing to support programming and execution of mobile agent based application upon Grid systems

Decentralized Resource Availability Prediction in Peer-to-Peer Desktop Grids

Grid computing is a form of distributed computing which is used by an organiza­ tion to handle its long-running computational tasks. Volunteer computing (desktop grid) is a type of grid computing that uses idle CPU cycles donated voluntarily by users, to run its tasks. In a desktop grid model, the resources are not dedicated. The job (computational task) is submitted for execution in the resource only when the resource is idle. There is no guarantee that the job which has started to execute in a resource will complete its execution without any disruption from user activity (such as keyboard click or mouse move). This problem becomes more challenging in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) model of desktop grids where there is no central server which takes the decision on whether to allocate a job to a resource. In this thesis we propose and implement a P2P desktop grid framework which does resource availability prediction. We try to improve the predictability of the system, by submitting the jobs on machines which have a higher probability of being available at a given time. We benchmark our framework and provide an analysis of our results

Centralized versus market-based approaches to mobile task allocation problem: State-of-the-art

Centralized approach has been adopted for finding solutions to resource allocation problems (RAPs) in many real-life applications. On the other hand, market-based approach has been proposed as an alternative to solve the problem due to recent advancement in ICT technologies. In spite of the existence of some efforts to review the pros and cons of each approach in RAPs, the studies cannot be directly applied to specific problem domains like mobile task allocation problem which is characterised with high level of uncertainty on the availability of resources (workers). This paper aims to review existing studies on task allocation problems(TAPs) focusing on those two approaches and their comparison and identify major issues that need to be resolved for comparing the two approaches in mobile task allocation problems. Mobile Task Allocation Problem (MTAP) is defined and its problematic structures are explained in relation with task allocation to mobile workers. Solutions produced by each approach to some applications and variations of MTAP are also discussed and compared. Finally, some future research directions are identified in order to compare both approaches in function of uncertainty emerging from the mobile nature of the MTAP