Brain Meets Brawn: Why Grid and Agents Need Each Other

TLDR

The Grid and agent communities develop open distributed systems from different angles—Grid emphasizes infrastructure and secure resource sharing, while agents focus on autonomous problem solving—yet their expanding scale drives a convergence where each requires the other's strengths. The authors aim to review the state of the art, identify shared challenges, and propose research and technology activities that enable mutually supportive Grid–agent collaborations. They conduct a comparative review of both communities, analyze the challenges, and outline research and technology development activities to foster collaboration.

Abstract

The Grid and agent communities both develop concepts and mechanisms for open distributed systems, albeit from different perspectives. The Grid community has historically focused on brawn: infrastructure, tools, and applications for reliable and secure resource sharing within dynamic and geographically distributed virtual organizations. In contrast, the agents community has focused on brain: autonomous problem solvers that can act flexibly in uncertain and dynamic environments. Yet as the scale and ambition of both Grid and agent deployments increase, we see a convergence of interests, with agent systems requiring robust infrastructure and Grid systems requiring autonomous, flexible behaviors. Motivated by this convergence of interests, we review the current state of the art in both areas, review the challenges that concern the two communities, and propose research and technology development activities that can allow for mutually supportive efforts.