Aglets Mobile Agent based Grid Monitoring System

Abstract

Grid offers an optimal solution to problems requiring large storage and/or processing power. Grid provides direct access to computers, data, software and many other resources. Sharing between these resources is highly controlled and done with consensus of both resource providers and consumers. Grid is not centrally controlled and resources can leave or join the grid environment at any time. The resources used in grid can be physically dispersed, heterogeneous and can span different administrative domains. Due to these reasons the interaction between these resources can result in failures. Besides this, protocol incompatibilities, security incompatibilities, network faults further contribute to failures. Moreover fundamental resources of grid are computers which may suffer from hardware and software problems also. Therefore, a mechanism is required to monitor these resources to check their availability, information gathering and reporting their failures. To address this problem, mobile agents can be used. Mobile agents reduce network use, overcome network latency and can execute autonomously and asynchronously. Mobile agents can also adapt dynamically with the changes in environment. They are naturally heterogeneous, robust and fault tolerant. Therefore, mobile agents are an obvious and favorable choice for creating grid related applications. In this thesis, a mobile agent based monitoring system for grid environment has been proposed. The proposed monitoring system is based on Aglets mobile agent platform. Hyperic SIGAR has been used to generate resource information. MySQL has been used as backend. Frontend has been designed and developed using PHP. The proposed system has been successfully deployed and tested in Research Lab of Computer Science and Engineering Department, Thapar University.