Agent-Based Resource Monitoring For Grid Environment

Abstract

Grid is an emerging technology for enabling resource sharing and coordinated problem solving in dynamic multi-institutional heterogeneous virtual organizations. Grid computing is being adopted in various areas from academic, industry research to government use. Grids are becoming platforms for high performance and distributed computing. Grid computing is the next generation IT infrastructure that promises to transform the way organizations and individuals compute, communicate and collaborate. The goal of Grid computing is to create the illusion of a simple but large and powerful self-managing virtual computer out of a large collection of connected heterogeneous systems sharing various combinations of resources.

One of the fundamental operations needed to support location-independent computing is resource monitoring. Grid Resource Monitoring is the process of collecting information concerning the characteristics and status of resources of interest. In the Grid environment, resources may belong to different institutions, have different usage policies and pose different requirements on acceptable requests. Grid resources may dynamically join and leave, their membership varies over time; even in fairly static settings, resource availability is subject to failures. Given this transient nature, users must be supported in finding and keeping track of resources of interest; which is the main purpose of Grid Information Services (GIS). In order for information services to address the mentioned user needs, they must systematically collect information regarding the current and, sometimes, past status of Grid resources. In addition to information services, monitoring is also crucial in a variety of cases such as scheduling, data replication, accounting, performance analysis and optimization of distributed systems or individual applications, self-tuning applications, and many more. Also, given the increasing number of Grid resources, real-time monitoring of their availability and utilization is becoming essential for effective management, particularly regarding the detection of faults and bottlenecks.

Focus of this thesis is to analyze existing Resource Monitoring Systems for Grid environment and an Agent-Based Resource Monitoring System has been proposed, designed and implemented for Grid environment.