Advance reservation, co-allocation and pricing of network and computational resources in grids

Through the introduction of economic principles, a Resource Management System (RMS) can incorporate user valuations and externalities such as the usage cost of resources, into its scheduling logic. Consequently, an economic RMS can extract more value from the available infrastructure compared to traditional RMSs. In order to use the available infrastructure efficiently, a grid RMS must take an application's data requirements into account. Although RMSs exist that support the co-allocation and advance reservation of both network and computational resources, they do not incorporate economic principles. In this paper we present ENARA, an economic RMS with advance reservation and co-allocation support for both network and computational resources. The RMS both allocates and prices resources in line with the demand and supply conditions in the network. Through the use of a novel algorithm that determines the limiting links within a network, the RMS is able to estimate prices of individual network links at the start of its planning phase. This resolves an interdependency issue between resource pricing and allocation. We demonstrate that ENARA is able to align resource allocations with user valuations, significantly increasing the user value generated compared to an online approach, while attaining high utilization levels of the infrastructure. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.