Abstract:

Grid computing is a technology that shares computational power (such as storage, CPU and memory) from distributed sites across the globe. Due to the heterogeneity and various owners of these resources, a seamless collaboration of the resources becomes harder to manage. Multi-agent technology could be used to meet this challenge, since agents are distributed in nature and autonomous and intelligent in behavior. Price is an important factor to motivate resource providers as well as users. One of the possible caveats to form an autonomous grid could be the dynamism of pricing mechanism. This paper focuses on two of the widely proposed economic models in this context; double auction and contract-net-protocol. We model a multiagent-based pricing framework where there are thousands of users with different resource demands as well as providers with their respective resource availability which are accommodated autonomously. A simulation environment is established and performances for different grid scenarios using the two different models are evaluated. We compare our results in terms of job rejection rate, total revenue gained by the provider and utilization of resources. The results show that in most cases, the double auction model performs better than contract-net-protocol. The contract-net model works well, when there are a few user and a few providers. Our findings could help grid resource providers to decide which model to use at a particular scenario in order to maximize profit.