Negotiation strategy for continuous long-term tasks in a grid environment

摘要

Nowadays, much research is concerned with execution of long-term continuous tasks, which produce data in real time, e.g. monitoring applications. These tasks can be run for months or years and they are usually resource intensive in terms of the large amounts of data which is processed per time unit. A Grid can potentially provide the amount of resources necessary to execute these tasks, but it might prove to be impossible or non-beneficial for a Grid to allocate resources for such long durations as these resources can be also requested by other clients or might join a Grid only for some periods of time. To resolve these differences, a client and a Grid Resource Allocator negotiate, and a client has to agree for a shorter execution period at the end of which it needs to negotiate again. In this paper, we discuss in detail a decision-making mechanism for a client as part of its negotiation strategy, which aims to increase the duration of execution periods and to decrease the duration of interruptions. This new strategy, ConTask, has been tested on a realistic Grid resource simulator, and it demonstrates better utilities than our strategy which has not been specifically designed for continuous tasks under various conditions.