Using Metadata Snapshots for Extending Ant-Based Resource Discovery Service in Inter-cooperative Grid Communities

Much work is under way within the resource management community on issues associated with grid scheduling upon dynamically discovered information. In this paper we tackle the problem by exploiting a bio-inspired resource discovery mechanism, where information is provided by ant-based lightweight mobile agents traveling across a grid network and collecting data from each visited node. We start by providing the current state of the adopted grid scheduler, which is the result of an existing collaborative project named SmartGRID, and its underlying architecture constructed by ant-based mobile agents. We consider the problem of discovering resources in specific grid communities, which are bounded due to different shared community policies, such as diverse ant colonies, different resource discovery approaches, or other issues. Several issues have been raised during the design and implementation of such infrastructure. A notable issue, namely how grid schedulers from various bounded grid communities could be used in a manner which would extend current SmartGRID functionality is identified. Our shared view is that by utilizing already discovered and stored grid nodes's metadata snapshots in the first instance we can facilitate a more convenient and efficient resource discovery operation next time. With this in mind, our paper goes on describing our shared vision with regard to this extended functionality as well as discussing the new conceptual basis and its model architecture.