TRAVELER: a mobile agent based infrastructure for wide area parallel computing

Abstract

The paper proposes a Java-based mobile agent infrastructure, TRAVELER, to support wide area parallel applications. Unlike other meta-computing systems, TRAVELER allows users to dispatch their compute-intensive jobs as mobile agents via a resource broker. The broker forms a parallel virtual machine atop servers to execute the agents. Since the agents can be programmed to satisfy their goals, even if they move and lose contact with their creators, they can survive intermittent or unreliable network connection. During their lifetime, the agents can also move themselves autonomously from one machine to another for load balancing, enhancing data locality, and tolerating faults. TRAVELER relies on an integrated distributed shared array runtime system in support of agent communications on clusters of servers. We demonstrated the feasibility of the TRAVELER in LU factorization problems.