Scheduling multi-component applications with mobile agents in heterogeneous distributed systems

Summary In grid computing environment, several classes of multi‐component applications exist. These types of applications may often require additional resources of different types that go beyond what is available in any of the sites making up the grid resource composition. The heterogeneity nature of both the user application and the computing environment makes this a challenging problem. However, the current off‐the‐shelf scheduling software can hardly cope with these diversities in distributed computing application frameworks. Therefore, there is the need for an adequate scheduling system that would grant simultaneous or coordinated access to application of multi‐component nature that requires resources of possibly multiple types, in multiple locations, managed by different resource providers. The main focus of this paper is to develop a mobile agent scheduling model that addresses the aforementioned challenge. A scheduling policy that pertains to job scheduling and resource allocation is proposed. The scheduling policy treats different multi‐component applications requiring diverse heterogeneous resources fairly. The policy is used by mobile agents to schedule user applications and to also find available and suitable distributed resource that are capable of executing user application at a very minimal time. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.