A mobile multi-agent system for distributed computing

Abstract

The paper describes a peer-to-peer distributed-computing platform, called YACA, based on mobile agents. Next to the client agents, which seek computational resources in a cluster, YACA consists of four agents, who manage the computers within a cluster. (1) The Directory Agent keeps track of the computers belonging to the cluster. These computers are called nodes. (2) The Weather Agent monitors the resources of a node and (3) the Account Agent keeps track of the resources used by each client agent. (4) The Controller Agent controls the access to a node and migrates client agents to other nodes in the cluster if the node becomes overloaded. Experiments showed that YACA brings little overhead. However, its load balancing algorithm has room for improvements. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.