Peer-to-peer discovery of computational resources for Grid applications

Abstract

Grid applications need to discover computational resources quickly, efficiently and scalably, but most importantly in an expressive manner. An expressive query may specify a variety of required metrics for the job, e.g., the number of hosts required, the amount of free CPU required on these hosts, and the minimum amount of RAM required on these hosts, etc. We present a peer-to-peer (P2P) solution to this problem, using structured naming to enable both (1) publishing of information about available computational resources, as well as (2) expressive and efficient querying of such resources. Extensive traces collected from hosts within the Computer Science department at UIUC are used to evaluate our proposed solution. Finally, our solutions are based upon a well known P2P system called Pastry, albeit for Grid applications; this is another step towards the much-needed convergence of Grid and P2P computing.