A Distributed Economic Meta-scheduler for the Grid

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.