Grid Resource Scheduling with Gossiping Protocols

Grid resource providers can use gossiping to disseminate their available resource state to remote regions of the grid to attract application load. Pairwise gossiping protocols exchange information about limited subsets of other resources between pairs of potentially remote participants. In epidemic gossiping protocols, the provider disseminates information to multiple neighbors, who in turn forward it to their neighbors, and so on. One important metric for these protocols is their coverage, which characterizes how many and which resources receive the information. Coverage characteristics of epidemic protocols are non-uniform, concentrated within the vicinity of a disseminating node; they can exhibit bi-modal behavior where information either reaches distant nodes or dies out quickly. Pairwise gossiping protocols, on the other hand, provide a more uniform coverage, but it can take longer for the dissemination to reach desired uniformity. In this paper, we study performance characteristics of three gossiping protocols: (1) epidemic gossiping, (2) pairwise gossiping, and (3) adaptive information dissemination (which is based on a form of epidemic gossiping). We report experimental results based on our simulation framework that compare the three protocols in terms of packet overhead and query satisfaction rates. We show that pairwise gossiping protocols work best when resource distribution on the grid is uniform, but that they can be configured to perform well in support of grid scheduling.