Adopting mobile agent technology can eliminate the need for the administrator to manage clusters, e.g., installation and upgrading of software, and auditing of clusters and networks. However, creating mobile agent-based network management systems is still in an ad-hoc manner but not on methodologies for building mobile agents for cluster and Grid computing. This paper presents a framework for reusable mobile agents for managing clusters in the sense that they are independent of either

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... cluster systems or applications. The framework enables a mobile agent to be composed from two layered components enables, which are mobile agents. The former is a carrier of the latter over particular networks independently of any management tasks and the latter defines management tasks performed at each host independently of any networks. The framework also offers a mechanism for matchmaking the two components. Since the mechanism is formulated based on a process algebra approach, it can strictly select an itinerary component suitable to perform management tasks at the hosts that the tasks want to visit over networks. The framework provides a methodology for easily developing and operating mobile agents for traveling among multiple clusters to perform their management tasks at each of the clusters that they visit.