HYGRA: A decentralized protocol for resource discovery and job allocation in large computational Grids

This paper presents a novel approach for resource finding and job allocation in a computational Grid. The technique proposed, called HYGRA for HYperspace-based Grid Resource Allocation, organises Grid nodes in a peer-to-peer architecture by building an overlay network in which each node is virtually connected to one or more neighbours. HYGRA is strongly based on spatial computing concepts: the available amount of each resource type is used as a geometric coordinate in a virtual Euclidean hyperspace. Therefore each Grid node is represented as a point in the hyperspace, on the basis of the amount of its free resources. A job request is also represented as a point in this hyperspace, according to the resource amounts needed for job execution. Thus, in this model, finding a Grid node suitable for execution of a job request means navigating the said resource hyperspace. Node search goes from neighbour to neighbour, following the overlay links trying to minimize the Euclidean distance between the current node and the target point representing the job, until the node nearest to it is found. The paper describes the algorithms for overlay construction and resource finding and assesses their validity and performances by means of simulation.