ARMSim: A Modeling and Simulation Environment for Agent-Based Grid Computing

Abstract

ARMS is an agent-based resource management system for grid computing in which agents are organized into a hierarchy and cooperate with each other to discover available grid resources using decentralized resource advertisement and discovery. Since a large-scale application of ARMS is not available, the most straightforward way to investigate the ARMS performance is through a modeling and simulation approach. In this work, an ARMS performance modeling and simulation environment (ARMSim) is presented. The ARMSim kernel is composed of a model composer and a simulation engine, while users can input related information and get simulation outputs from corresponding GUIs. A case study is included using an example model with more than 1000 agents, and several experiments carried out each involve nearly 100,000 requests. ARMSim enables the ARMS agent performance to be investigated quantitatively, and simulation results have the potential to be used at running time for online ARMS performance improvement.