  Distributed Services Architecture with support for mobile agents between
services, offer significantly improved communication and computational
flexibility. The uses of agents allow execution of complex operations that
involve large amounts of data to be processed effectively using distributed
resources. The prototype system Distributed Agents for Mobile and Dynamic
Services (DIAMOnDS), allows a service to send agents on its behalf, to other
services, to perform data manipulation and processing. Agents have been
implemented as mobile services that are discovered using the Jini Lookup
mechanism and used by other services for task management and communication.
Agents provide proxies for interaction with other services as well as specific
GUI to monitor and control the agent activity. Thus agents acting on behalf of
one service cooperate with other services to carry out a job, providing
inter-operation of loosely coupled services in a semi-autonomous way. Remote
file system access functionality has been incorporated by the agent framework
and allows services to dynamically share and browse the file system resources
of hosts, running the services. Generic database access functionality has been
implemented in the mobile agent framework that allows performing complex data
mining and processing operations efficiently in distributed system. A basic
data searching agent is also implemented that performs a query based search in
a file system. The testing of the framework was carried out on WAN by moving
Connectivity Test agents between AgentStations in CERN, Switzerland and NUST,
Pakistan.
