Brain Meets Brawn: Why Grid and Agents Need Each Other

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.

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Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Distributed artificial intelligence

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

    • Search engine architectures and scalability

      • Distributed retrieval

      • Peer-to-peer retrieval

  • Information storage systems

    • Storage architectures

      • Distributed storage

• Software and its engineering

  • Software organization and properties

    • Software system structures

      • Distributed systems organizing principles