Adaptive Negotiation for Agent-Based Grid Computing

The Grid concept has recently emerged as a vision for future network based computing, by enabling seamless integration of computing systems and clusters, data storage, specialized networks and sophisticated analysis and visualization software. Intelligent agents can play an important role in helping achieve the Grid vision. Although agents have been applied to computing load balancing for many years, attempts to apply intelligent agents in realizing the Grid vision have been made by academic researchers during the past few years. Due to the highly heterogeneous and complex computing environments, effective load balancing for Grid computing is a very difficult problem, even though intelligent agents are used. In this paper we attempt to highlight major challenges in managing resources in a Grid computing environment and present some of our recent work on adaptive negotiation strategies for agent-based load balancing and Grid computing. The proposed approach is to implement multiple negotiation models/protocols/strategies that can be selected by the system automatically to adapt to computation needs as well as changing computing resource environment.