Agent-Based Autonomous Scheduling Mechanism Using Availability in Desktop Grid Systems

This paper addresses scheduling strategies to achieve high performance in desktop grid systems. The recent desktop grid systems can be characterized by decentralized control, large scale and extreme dynamism of their computation environment. In the environment of high throughput desktop grid systems, the volatility of volunteers, and the decentralized nature of desktop grid systems pose significant challenges. Our approach makes use of autonomous scheduling mechanisms on a computational overlay network to meet these challenges. However, current approaches to utilizing desktop resources require either centralized servers, or extensive knowledge of the underlying system, limiting scalability and performance. In this paper an Agent-Based Autonomous Scheduling (ABAS) mechanism on a computational overlay network is proposed to further improve performance through adaptive behavior of agents which have replication, migration, and checkpointing scheme. Performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed scheduling mechanism improves throughput using Korea@Home.