Co-scheduling with user-settable reservations

As grid computing becomes more commonplace, so does the importance of coscheduling these geographically distributed resources. Negotiating resource management and scheduling decisions for these resources is similar to making travel arrangements: guesses are made and then remade or confirmed depending on the availability of resources. This "Travel Agent Method" serves as the basis for a production scheduler and metascheduler suitable for making travel arrangements for a grid. This strategy is more easily implemented than centralized metascheduler because arrangements can be made without requiring control over the individual schedulers for each resource: the reservations are set by users or automatically by negotiating with each local scheduler's user settable interface. The Generic Universal Remote is a working implementation of such a system and proves that a user-settable reservation facility on local schedulers in a grid is sufficient to enable automated metascheduling.