Interworking of traders in a distributed computing environment

Distributed computing systems are composed of various types of services. Providing a reliable and efficient distributed computing environment largely depends on the effective management of these services. One important aspect of managing services within a distributed computing environment is maintaining information about the services, especially at run-time. To facilitate this, much work has been done on mechanisms called Traders that provide a framework for managing and exchanging services in an open distributed computing environment. Open Distributed Processing (ODP), a proposed ISO standard, includes such a trader mechanism. This paper addresses problems associated with providing a single transparent trading service in the presence of multiple physical traders in a large distributed computing environment. The group of traders form a federation or interworking of traders which share their service offer spaces. We present the design for the interworking of traders, as well as a prototype implementation using OSF DCE, and report our experience with it to date.