Dynamic Allocation of Servers to Jobs in a Grid Hosting Environment

As computational resources become available for use over the Internet, a requirement has emerged to reconfigure servers to an optimal allocation to cope with an unpredictable flow of incoming jobs. This paper describes an architecture that allows the dynamic reconfiguration of servers to process incoming jobs by switching servers between conceptual pools. The system makes use of heuristic policies to make close-to-optimal switching decisions. A prototype system which builds on existing resource management software has been developed to demonstrate some of the concepts described.