A peer-to-peer decentralized strategy for resource management in computational Grids

This paper presents a peer-to-peer (P2P) approach for the management, in a computational Grid, of those resources that are featured by numerical quantity and thus characterized by a coefficient of utilization, such as percentage of CPU time, disk space, memory space, etc. The proposed approach exploits spatial computing concepts and models a Grid by means of a flat P2P architecture consisting of nodes connected by an overlay network; such a network topology, together with the quantity of resource available in each node, forms a three-dimensional surface, where valleys correspond to nodes with a large quantity of available resource. In this scenario, this paper proposes an algorithm for resource discovery that is based on navigating such a surface, in search of the deepest valley (global minimum, that is, the best node). The algorithm, which aims at fairly distributing among nodes the quantity of leased resource, is based on some heuristics that mimic the laws of kinematics. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the algorithm. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.