Efficient Dynamic Resource Description

Efficient resource allocation is an important aspect in overall distributed system performance and especially in the provisioning of QoS guarantees. In order to achieve efficient resource allocation an accurate, efficient and timely resource description mechanism is required. This report presents the Resource Description Graph (RDG) as a means of encoding resource descriptions in a directed acyclic graph. The RDG is used to represent available and required resources for hosts and applications respectively. The RDG has many desirable properties including versatility, expressiveness, modularity, and composition. The major challenge faced by systems using resource descriptions is the matching of requirements with availability in an efficient manner, and as such this is the major focus of this research. Three alternative algorithms presented in this report quantify the cost of matching resource requirements and availabilities. It is shown that through the use of a modular approach the computational time to match a resource description is minimised, for example a complex RDG containing thirty resource types and constraints is matched in less than 1ms. An algorithm to dynamically produce RDGs is also presented, this enables a truly real-time reflection of the state of a host.