Title: Multi-agent distributed adaptive resource allocation (MADARA)

Authors: James Edmondson, Douglas Schmidt

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, 2015 Terrace Place, Nashville, TN 37203, USA. ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering Program, Vanderbilt University, 2015 Terrace Place, Nashville, TN 37203, USA

Abstract: The component placement problem involves mapping a component to a particular location and maximising component utility in grid and cloud systems. It is also an NP hard resource allocation and deployment problem, so many common grid and cloud computing libraries, such as MPICH and Hadoop, do not address this problem, even though large performance gains can occur by optimising communications between nodes. This paper provides four contributions to research on the component placement problem for grid and cloud computing environments. First, we present the multi-agent distributed adaptive resource allocation (MADARA) toolkit, which is designed to address grid and cloud allocation and deployment needs. Second, we present a heuristic called the comparison-based iteration by degree (CID) heuristic, which we use to approximate optimal deployments in MADARA. Third, we analyse the performance of applying the CID heuristic to approximate common grid and cloud operations, such as broadcast, gather and reduce. Fourth, we evaluate the results of applying genetic programming mutation to improve our CID heuristic.

Keywords: grid computing; cloud computing; component placement; NP hard heuristics; deployment planning; MPI; reactive agents; multi-agent systems; MAS; agent-based systems; adaptive resource allocation; distributed resource allocation; middleware specification.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2010.034946

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2010 Vol.5 No.3, pp.229 - 245

Published online: 31 Aug 2010 *

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