Price driven market mechanism for computational grid resource allocation

This paper presents a price driven market mechanism for resource allocation in computational grid. A system model is described that allows agents representing various grid resources, which owned by different real world enterprises, to coordinate their resource allocation decisions without assuming a priori cooperation. The grid task agents buy resources to complete tasks. Grid resource agents charge the task agents for the amount of resource capacity allocated. Given grid resource agent's pricing policy, the task agent optimization problem is to complete its job as quickly as possible when spending the least possible amount of money. This paper provides a price-directed proportional resource allocation algorithm for solving the grid task agent resource allocation problem. Experiments are made to compare the performance of the price-directed resource allocation with conventional Round-Robin allocation.