Market-based grid resource co-allocation and reservation for applications with hard deadlines

Grid computing technology enables the creation of large-scale IT infrastructures that are shared across organizational boundaries. In such shared infrastructures, conflicts between user requirements are common and originate from the selfish actions that users perform when formulating their service requests. The introduction of economic principles in grid resource management offers a promising way of dealing with these conflicts. We develop and analyze both a centralized and a decentralized algorithm for economic grid resource management in the context of compute bound applications with deadline-based quality of service requirements and non-migratable workloads. Through the use of reservations, we co-allocate resources across multiple providers in order to ensure that applications finish within their deadline. An evaluation of both algorithms is presented and their performance in terms of realized user value is compared with an existing market-based resource management algorithm. We establish that our algorithms, which operate under a more realistic workload model, can closely approximate the performance of this algorithm. We also quantify the effect of allowing local workload preemption and different scheduling heuristics on the realized user value. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.