As grid computing becomes more commonplace, so does the importance of coscheduling these geographically distributed resourcest. Negotiating resource management and scheduling decisions for these resources is similar to making travel arrangements: guesses are made and then remade or confirmed depending on the availability of resources. This “Travel Agent Method” serves as the basis for a production scheduler and metascheduler suitable for making travel arrangements for a grid. This strategy is more easily implemented than a centralized metascheduler because arrangements can be made without requiring control over the individual schedulers for each resource: the reservations are set by users or automatically by negotiating with each local scheduler’s user-settable interface. The Generic Universal Remote is a working implementation of such a system and proves that a user-settable reservation facility on local schedulers in a grid is sufficient to enable automated metascheduling.
Kenneth Yoshimoto, Patricia A. Kovatch, Phil Andre