A Distributed Economic Meta-scheduler for the Grid
Kyle Chard, Kris Bubendorfer · 2008
In this paper we present DRIVE, a novel architecture for a virtual organization (VO) based distributed economic meta-scheduler in which members of the VO collaboratively allocate grid resources. Resource providers joining the VO contribute obligation services to the VO. These contributed services are in effect membership 'dues' and are used in the running of the VO's operations - allocation, advertising, management, etc. We use an auction plug-in mechanism to support arbitrary auction protocols which allows users to choose a protocol based on specific requirements and infrastructural availability. For instance, within a single organization, where internal trust exists, users can achieve maximum allocation performance by choosing a conventional sealed bid auction plug-in. In a global utility Grid no such trust exists. The same meta-scheduler architecture can be used with a more expensive secure auction protocol plug- in which ensures the allocation is carried out fairly in the absence of trust The DRIVE prototype has been implemented as a collection of standard WSRF Web services and includes a distributed implementation of a secure combinatorial Garbled Circuit protocol.