Scalable Contract Net Based Resource Allocation Strategies for Grids

Different economic models have been applied to the resource allocation problem in grids. Contract net is one such model in which a job is announced to the resources, the resources bid for the job, and then the broker chooses one bid from the received bids based on some policy. The job is awarded to the resource with the winning bid. In this paper, we first propose a contract net based resource allocation policy for grids based on an earlier policy, that performs better than other existing policies. We next perform a scalability analysis of the policy to show that it is not scalable. Finally we present strategies to make contract net scalable in large grid resource allocation problems. We present detailed simulation results to evaluate the performances of the proposed strategies.