Abstract

Several Grids have been established and used for varying science applications during the last years. Most of these Grids, however, work in isolation and with different utilisation levels. Previous work introduced an architecture and a mechanism to enable resource sharing amongst Grids. It demonstrated that there can be benefits for a Grid to offload requests or provide spare resources to another Grid, thus reducing the cost of over-provisioning. These benefits derive from the fact that resource utilisation within a Grid has fixed and operational costs such as those with electricity providers and system administrators. In this work, we address the problem of resource provisioning to Grid applications in multiple-Grid environments. The provisioning is carried out based on availability information obtained from queueing-based resource management systems deployed at the provider sites who are the participants of the Grids. We evaluate the performance of different allocation policies. In contrast to existing work on load sharing across Grids, the policies described here take into account the local load of resource providers, imprecise availability information and the monetary compensation of providers. In addition, we evaluate these policies along with mechanism that allows resource sharing amongst Grids. Experimental results obtained through simulation show that the mechanism and policies are effective in redirecting requests thus improving the applications’ average weighted response time.

Citations