Availability modeling and cost optimization for the grid resource management system

Grid computing is a recently developed technique for complex systems with large-scale resource sharing, wide-area communication, and multi-institutional collaboration. Although the development tools and techniques for the grid have been extensively investigated, the availability of the grid resource management system (RMS) has not been comprehensively studied. In order to contribute to this lacking but important field, this paper first models the grid RMS availability by considering both the failures of resource management (RM) servers and the length limitation of request queues. A hierarchical Markov reward model is implemented to evaluate the grid RMS availability. Based on the availability model, an optimization problem for designing the grid RMS is studied in order to minimize the cost by determining the best number of RM servers. Then, the sensitivity analysis is conducted, and a dynamic switching scheduling method is further presented based on the sensitivity analysis. © 2007 IEEE.