Grid computing provides the necessary infrastructure to pool together diverse and distributed resources interconnected by networks to provide a unified virtual computing resource view to the user. One of the important responsibilities of the grid software is resource management and techniques to allow the user to make optimal use of the resources for executing applications. In addition to the goals of minimizing job completion time and achieving good throughput there are other minimum requirements such as minimum memory and cpu requirements, choice of operating system, fine grained file access permissions etc. Currently such requirements are being fulfilled by resource brokers, which act as mediating agents between users and resource owners.

In this thesis we approach the resource brokering architectural issue in a different manner. Instead of a monolithic broker, which performs all the superscheduling functions we propose a Modular Framework based Architecture for Task Initiation and Scheduling (MFATIC) based on the three main stages in the superscheduling process.

There are three major goals of this research. The first aim is to develop a decoupled architectural model that not only provides a clear distinction in the responsibilities of each of the components but also provides the user the flexibility to replace one component with another functionally equivalent component. Secondly each of these components should be configurable and extensible to be able to accommodate user requirements. Finally, the design should enable the user to plug in modules within components of different deployments of the resource broker and thus promoting software reuse.