Patent ID: 8468246

Claim:
A distributed computing system, comprising: a computing grid including a plurality of grid nodes, each grid node being assigned to service at least one of a plurality of tiers of clients, each tier associated with a corresponding quality of service level, a first set of grid nodes assigned to service only a first tier of clients, a second set of the grid nodes assigned to service a second tier of clients, and a third set of grid nodes assigned to service a combination of the first, second, and third tiers of clients; a web server configured in a service-oriented architecture and operable to provide one or more business applications to a plurality of clients by executing one or more services on the plurality of grid nodes, each of the clients being associated with a corresponding tier of the plurality of tiers; and a resource control system communicatively coupled to the web server and operable to: determine a least busy set of grid nodes selected from the first set of grid nodes and the third set of grid nodes based on a received request from the first tier of clients; allocate the first tier of clients to the first set of grid nodes based on determining that the first set of grid nodes is the least busy set of grid nodes selected from the first set of grid nodes and the third set of grid nodes; receive one or more performance parameters of the business applications executed on the first set of the plurality of grid nodes; determine the first tier of clients being serviced by the first set of grid nodes; provision one or more additional services to execute on the first set of grid nodes in response to the performance parameters falling below a predetermined minimum level; un-provision one or more services executed on the first set of grid nodes in response to the performance parameters exceeding a predetermined maximum level; provision one or more additional grid nodes from the plurality of grid nodes in response to the performance parameters falling below the predetermined minimum level; and un-provision one or more of the first subset of grid nodes in response to the performance parameters exceeding the predetermined maximum level.