GoDIET: a tool for managing distributed hierarchies of DIET agents and servers

The Distributed Interactive Engineering Toolbox (DIET) is an Application Service Provider (ASP) platform providing remote execution of computational problems on distributed, heterogeneous resources. Traditional ASP toolkits are based on a single, centralized scheduling agent coordinating computation requests from clients with service offerings from servers. DIET is based on a hierarchy of agents that collaborate to perform scheduling decisions; we are exploring the benefits of hierarchical agent architectures for scalability and adaptation to heterogeneous network performance. This paper describes GoDIET, a new tool for the configuration, launch, and management of DIET on computational grids. Users of GoDIET write an XML file describing their available compute and storage resources and the desired overlay of DIET agents and servers onto those resources. GoDIET automatically generates and stages all necessary configuration files, launches agents and servers in appropriate hierarchical order, reports feedback on the status of running components, and allows shutdown of all launched software. We present a series of experiments that permit the evaluation of the performance of GoDIET for several launch and management approaches. We also evaluate the robustness of the DIET platform for a large number of servers.