Concurrent Negotiation and Coordination for Grid Resource Coallocation

Bolstering resource coallocation is essential for realizing the Grid vision, because computationally intensive applications often require multiple computing resources from different administrative domains. Given that resource providers and consumers may have different requirements, successfully obtaining commitments through concurrent negotiations with multiple resource providers to simultaneously access several resources is a very challenging task for consumers. The impetus of this paper is that it is one of the earliest works that consider a concurrent negotiation mechanism for Grid resource coallocation. The concurrent negotiation mechanism is designed for 1) managing (de)commitment of contracts through one-to-many negotiations and 2) coordination of multiple concurrent one-to-many negotiations between a consumer and multiple resource providers. The novel contributions of this paper are devising 1) a
utility-oriented coordination
(
UOC
) strategy, 2) three classes of
commitment management strategies
(
CMSs
) for concurrent negotiation, and 3) the negotiation protocols of consumers and providers. Implementing these ideas in a testbed, three series of experiments were carried out in a variety of settings to compare the following: 1) the
CMSs
in this paper with the work of others in a single one-to-many negotiation environment for one resource where decommitment is allowed for both provider and consumer agents; 2) the performance of the three classes of
CMSs
in different resource market types; and 3) the
UOC
strategy with the work of others [e.g., the
patient coordination strategy
(
PCS
)] for coordinating multiple concurrent negotiations. Empirical results show the following: 1) the
UOC
strategy achieved higher utility, faster negotiation speed, and higher success rates than
PCS
for different resource market types; and 2) the
CMS
in this paper achieved higher final utility than the
CMS
in other works. Additionally, the properties of the three classes of
CMSs
in different kinds of resource markets are also verified.