A Peer-to-Peer Approach to Resource Location in Grid Environments

Resource location (or discovery) is a fundamental service for resource-sharing environments: given desired resource attributes, the service returns locations of matching resources. Designing such a service for a Grid environment of the scale and volatility of today’s peer-to-peer systems is not trivial. We explore part of the design space through simulations on an emulated Grid. To this end, we propose four axes that define the resource location design space, model and implement an emulated Grid, evaluate a set of resource discovery mechanisms, and discuss results.