Most, if not all, Computational Grid resource allocation and scheduling research espouses one of two paradigms: centralized omnipotent resource control [1–4] or localized application control [5–8]. The first is not a scalable solution either in terms of execution efficiency (the resource broker or scheduler becomes a bottleneck) or fault resilience (the allocation mechanism is a single point of failure). On the other hand, the second approach can lead to unstable resource assignments as ‘Grid-awar