Distributed Grid Resource Discovery with Matchmakers

The Grid provides mechanisms to share dynamic, heterogeneous, distributed resources spanned across multiple administrative domains. Resources required to execute a job are identified from the resource pool based on the desired set of attributes of the resources that exhibit various degrees of dynamism. A Resource Discovery service provides mechanisms to identify the set of resources that are capable of satisfying the job requirements. Current grid systems (Condor, European Data Grid) employ centralized matchmakers for resource discovery. Centralized matchmakers become a performance bottle neck as the grid grows. To alleviate this problem and to effectively exploit the grid, a distributed matchmaking approach is desirable not only for performance reasons, but also to surmount single point failures for grid resource discovery. In this paper, a novel distributed matchmaking approach for resource discovery in large, dynamically varying collections of grid resources is proposed.