Cloud Agency: A Mobile Agent Based Cloud System

The cloud paradigm appeared on the computing scene in 2005 with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). After this date, a large set of related technologies has been developed. In the academic world, and especially in the HPC area, cloud computing is in some way in competition with the GRID model, which offers a middleware based approach. One of the solutions proposed is the integration of the two paradigms, in order to use the enormous potential of the existent computational GRIDs in new ways. One of the most diffused problems on this systems is the choice of the correct programming paradigm: many different approaches exist and it is difficult to define which is the approach that best fit with the cloud paradigm. In this paper we propose the integration of a Cloud on GRID architecture with a mobile agent platform. The architecture we propose offer Virtual clusters with full administrative control to final users, adopting an existent GRID architecture and especially its security infrastructure. The mobile agent platform is able to dynamically add and configure services on the virtual clusters. The experience here presented shows that the mobile agent paradigm well fulfills the dynamic properties of the Cloud paradigm and could be a good choice to simply develop application and services able to dynamically adapt themselves to the virtualized environment.