  Computer simulation is finding a role in an increasing number of scientific
disciplines, concomitant with the rise in available computing power. Realizing
this inevitably requires access to computational power beyond the desktop,
making use of clusters, supercomputers, data repositories, networks and
distributed aggregations of these resources. Accessing one such resource
entails a number of usability and security problems; when multiple
geographically distributed resources are involved, the difficulty is
compounded.
  This presents the user with the problem of how to gain access to suitable
resources to run their workloads as they need them. In this paper we present
our solutions to this problem, a resource trading platform that allows users to
purchase access to resources within a distributed e-infrastructure. We present
the implementation of this Resource Allocation Market Place as a distributed
multi-agent system, and show how it provides a highly flexible, efficient tool
to schedule workflows across high performance computing resources.
