A Peer-to-Peer Mechanism for Resource Location and Allocation Over the Grid

Recent advances in P2P lookup overlays provide an appealing solution for distributed search without relying on a single database server. In addition to performing resource discovery, these P2P substrates also offer membership management for dynamic peers. In this paper, we propose a publicly shared architecture called VCA that takes advantage of a P2P lookup substrate for computational applications. VCA targets computational master-slave applications. An application running in VCA dynamically allocates resources from the system on the fly. These allocated resources then self-manage and -heal. We have implemented an architecture based on our previous efforts that include an enhanced P2P lookup overlay and a mobile agent system on top of this overlay. We show that VCA is not only scalable but robust, and takes advantage of heterogeneity of the resources.