Towards an Agent-Based Augmented Cloud

In the paper an agent-based framework deployed in hybrid cluster and volunteer computing environment is presented. It utilizes two concepts proposed by the authors: Augmented Cloud and Agent Platform as a Service (AgPaaS). Both concepts are discussed in the context of Cloud Computing as defined by NIST. The key idea of the presented solution is to span the cloud (i.e., computing infrastructure) beyond the data center borders by utilizing web browsers as computational workers. The feasibility of the approach was demonstrated by two prototypes: the first one was based on Java Applets and Adobe Flash, whereas the second one on Microsoft Silverlight. The prototypes were next used to perform simple experiments, mainly related to scalability issues. Selected results from the experiments are discussed in the final part of the paper.