Agent-based platform to support the execution of parallel tasks

Parallel computing has been radically evolving in the recent years from the supercomputer multi-processor centralised point of view to the modern distributed approaches such as grid computing. The availability of relatively obsolete or underused hardware and the increasing LAN and WAN interconnection speed have motivated the success of those new paradigms. In this paper, we propose the use of agent technology to improve the management, flexibility and reusability of grid-like parallel computing architectures. We present a general purpose agent-based architecture which is able to manage and execute independent parallel tasks through one or several heterogeneous computer networks - or even Internet nodes - exploiting state of the art agent mobility capabilities. A particular application of the proposed architecture to support the execution of a complex knowledge acquisition task is also introduced, showing a high scalability and a very low overhead. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.