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AgentTeamwork: Coordinating grid-computing jobs with mobile agents

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Abstract

AgentTeamwork is a grid-computing middleware system that dispatches a collection of mobile agents to coordinate a user job over remote computing nodes in a decentralized manner. Its utmost focus is to maintain high availability and dynamic balancing of distributed computing resources to a parallel-computing job. For this purpose, a mobile agent is assigned to each process engaged in the same job, monitors its execution at a different machine, takes its periodical execution snapshot, moves it to a lighter-loaded machine, and resumes it from the latest snapshot upon an accidental crash. The system also restores broken inter-process communication involved in the same job using its error-recoverable socket and mpiJava libraries in collaboration among mobile agents.

We have implemented the first version of our middleware including a mobile agent execution platform, error-recoverable socket and mpiJava API libraries, a job wrapper program, and several types of mobile agents such as commander, resource, sentinel, and bookkeeper agents, each orchestrating, allocating resources to, monitoring and maintaining snapshots of a user process respectively. This paper presents AgentTeamwork’s execution model, its implementation techniques, and our performance evaluation using the Java Grande benchmark test programs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computing & Software Systems, University of Washington, Bothell

    Munehiro Fukuda

  2. Computer Science, Ehime University, Japan

    Koichi Kashiwagi & Shinya Kobayashi

Authors
  1. Munehiro Fukuda
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  2. Koichi Kashiwagi
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  3. Shinya Kobayashi
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Munehiro Fukuda.

Additional information

Munehiro Fukuda received a B.S. from the College of Information Sciences and an M.S. from the Master’s Program in Science and Enginnering at the University of Tsukuba in 1986 and 1988. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science at the University of California at Irvine in 1995 and 1997, respectively. He worked at IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory from 1988 to 1993 and taught at the University of Tsukuba from 1998 to 2001. Since 2001, he has been an assistant professor at Computing & Software Systems, the University of Washington, Bothell. His research interests include mobile agents, multi-threading, cluster computing, grid computing and distributed simulations.

Koichi Kashiwagi received a Bachelor of Science degree from the Faculty of Science, Ehime University in 2000 and a Master of Engineering degree from the Department of Compter Science, Ehime University in 2002. In 2004 he became a research assistant in Department of Compter Science, Ehime University. His research interests include distributed computing, job scheduling, and grid computing.

Shin-ya Kobayashi received the B.E. degree, M.E. degree, and Dr.E. degree in Communication Engineering from Osaka University in 1985, 1988, and 1991 respectively. From 1991 to 1999, he was on the faculty of Engineering at Kanazawa University, Japan. From 1999 to 2004, He was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science, Ehime University. He is a Professor at Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Ehime University. His research interests include distributed processing, and parallel processing. He is a member of the Information Processing Society of Japan, the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, IEEE, and ACM.

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Fukuda, M., Kashiwagi, K. & Kobayashi, S. AgentTeamwork: Coordinating grid-computing jobs with mobile agents. Appl Intell 25, 181–198 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-006-9653-6

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