Peer-to-Peer Approaches to Grid Resource Discovery

Peer-to-peer organization of Grid resource discovery services would have several desirable features, including high scalability, high reliability, self-organization and self-healing. In this paper, we describe challenges in applying P2P techniques to Grid services. These include the choice of overlay configuration and varying security requirements for Grid and P2P environments. We present the design and implementation of two peer-to-peer Grid resource discovery services: an unstructured peer-to-peer information service and a structured peer-to-peer replica location service. We discuss the design tradeoffs, performance and scalability of these two systems as well as related work and ongoing challenges for applying P2P techniques to Grid discovery services.