Computing DOI 10.1007/s00607-014-0427-4 THRD: Threshold-based hierarchical resource discovery for Grid environments Mahdi Mollamotalebi · Raheleh Maghami · Abdul Samad Ismail Received: 28 October 2013 / Accepted: 4 September 2014 © Springer-Verlag Wien 2014 Abstract The resource discovery is one of the most important services in Grid sys- tems because providing the resources is critical to handle the applications. But some inherent characteristics of Grid environments such as large-scale and dynamicity make the resource discovery a challenging task. The hierarchical structure is widely used in Grid resource discovery but it suffers from high message load especially in upper level indexing nodes. This paper proposes a technique to reduce the message load of upper level indexing nodes in the hierarchical resource discovery. It applies a threshold value for in-process messages of indexing nodes to limit the queries passed to upper levels. The queries are checked in the sibling nodes of current level when they are not allowed to be passed to the parent node.The proposed technique is simulated in GridSim and experimented by different configurations of threshold values and number of Grid nodes. The experimental results showed that the proposed technique is able to reduce the message load of indexing nodes as 21.2 % however it also affects negatively on the response time of issued resource queries as 19.3 %. Therefore, the proposed technique is an appropriate solution for the applications with priority of lower message loads relative to the response time. Keywords Grid computing · Resource discovery · Threshold-based · Hierarchical · Message load · Response time M. Mollamotalebi (B ) · R. Maghami Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering, Buinzahra Branch, Islamic Azad University, Buinzahra, Iran e-mail: motalebi@gmail.com; mmahdi2@live.utm.my A. S. Ismail Faculty of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310 Skudai, Malaysia 123