In this paper, we present a resource monitoring and selection method for rapid turnaround grid applications (for example, within 10 seconds). The novelty of our method is the distributed evaluation of resources for rapidly selecting the appropriate idle resources. We integrate our method with a widely used resource management system, namely the Monitoring and Discovery System 2 (MDS2), and compare our method with the original MDS2 in terms of the performance and the scalability. The performance is measured using a 64-node cluster of PCs and the scalability is analyzed using a theoretical model and the measured performance. The experimental results show that our method reduces the resource selection time by 82%, as compared with the original MDS2. The scalability analysis also indicates that our method can keep the resource selection time within 1 second, up to 500 nodes in local-area-network (LAN) environments. In addition, some simulation results are presented to estimate the impact of our method for wide-area-network (WAN) environments.