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A computational grid is a hardware and software infrastructure that provides dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to high-end computational capability. An ideal grid environment should provide access to the available resources in a seamless manner. Resource management is an important infrastructural component of a grid computing environment. The overall aim of resource management is to efficiently schedule applications that need to utilise the available resources in the grid environment. In this work, an A4 (Agile Architecture and Autonomous Agents) methodology is introduced for the development of large-scale distributed software systems with highly dynamic behaviours. An agent is considered to be both a service provider and a service requestor. Agents are organised into a hierarchy with service advertisement and discovery capabilities. An Agent-based Resource Management System (ARMS) is implemented for grid computing, based on an existing application performance prediction toolkit PACE. Experimental results show that better load balancing can be achieved among multiple grid resources.

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Junwei Cao is currently a Professor and Vice Director of Research Institute of Information Technology, Tsinghua University, China. He is also a Visiting Scientist of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He works on advanced computing technology and applications. He has published 110 papers with over 2200 citations. He´s a IEEE Senior Member.

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