A peer-to-peer mechanism for resource location and allocation over the grid

Recent advances in P2P lookup overlays provide an appealing solution for distributed search without relying on a single database server. In addition to performing resource discovery, these P2P substrates also offer membership management for dynamic peers. In this paper, we propose a publicly shared architecture called VC²A that takes advantage of a P2P lookup substrate for computational applications. VC²A targets computational master-slave applications. An application running in VC²A dynamically allocates resources from the system on the fly. These allocated resources then self-manage and -heal. We have implemented an architecture based on our previous efforts that include an enhanced P2P lookup overlay and a mobile agent system on top of this overlay. We show that VC²A is not only scalable but robust, and takes advantage of heterogeneity of the resources.