Large-scale cooperative task distribution on peer-to-peer networks

Large-scale systems are part of a growing trend in distributed computing, and coordinating control of them is an increasing challenge. This paper presents a cooperative agent system that scales to one million or more nodes in which agents form coalitions to complete global task objectives. This approach uses the large-scale Command and Control (C2) capabilities of the Resource Clustered Chord (RC-Chord) Hierarchical Peer-to-Peer (HP2P) design. Tasks are submitted that require access to processing, data, or hardware resources, and a distributed agent search is performed to recruit agents to satisfy the distributed task. This approach differs from others by incorporating design elements to accommodate large-scale systems into the resource location algorithm. Peersim simulations demonstrate that the distributed coalition formation algorithm is as effective as an omnipotent central algorithm in a one million agent system.