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USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - COOTS 99
Adaptation and Specialization for High Performance Mobile Agents
Dong Zhou and Karsten Schwan, Georgia Institute of Technology
Abstract
Mobile agents as a new design paradigm for distributed computing
potentially permit network applications to operate across
dynamic and heterogeneous systems and networks.
Agent computing, however, is subject to inefficiencies. Namely, due to
the heterogeneous nature of the environments in which agents are
executed, agent-based programs must rely on underlying
agent systems to mask some of those complexities by using
system-wide, uniform representations of agent code and data and
by 'hiding' the volatility in agents' 'spatial' relationships.
This paper explores runtime adaptation and agent specialization
for improving the performance of agent-based programs.
Our general aim is to enable programmers
to employ these techniques to improve program performance without
sacrificing the fundamental advantages promised by mobile agent
programming. The specific results in this paper demonstrate the
beneficial effects of agent adaptation both for a single mobile
agent and for several cooperating agents, using the adaptation
techniques of agent morphing and agent fusion.
Experimental results are attained with two sample high performance
distributed applications, derived from the scientific domain
and from sensor-based codes, respectively.
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Technical Program