Peer-to-Peer Models for Resource Discovery on Grids
Resource discovery is a key issue for Grid systems in which applications are composed of hardware and software resources that need to be located. Classical approaches to Grid resource discovery are either centralized or hierarchical and will prove inefficient as the scale of Grid systems rapidly increases. On the other hand, the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) paradigm emerged as a successful model that achieves scalability in distributed systems. One possibility would be to borrow existing methods from the P2P paradigm and to adopt them to Grid systems taking into consideration the existing differences. Several such attempts have been made during the last couple of years. This report aims to serve as a review of the most promising Grid systems that use P2P techniques to facilitate resource discovery in order to perform a qualitative comparison of the existing approaches and to draw conclusions about their advantages and weaknesses. Future research directions in the field are also discussed. This research work is carried out under the FP6 Network of Excellence CoreGRID funded by the European Commission (Contract IST-2002004265).