Design and implementation tradeoffs for wide-area resource discovery

This paper describes the design and implementation of SWORD, a scalable resource discovery service for wide-area distributed systems. In contrast to previous systems, SWORD allows users to describe desired resources as a topology of interconnected groups with required intragroup, intergroup, and per-node characteristics, along with the utility that the application derives from various ranges of values of those characteristics. This design gives users the flexibility to find geographically distributed resources for applications that are sensitive to both node and network characteristics, and allows the system to rank acceptable configurations based on their quality for that application. We explore a variety of architectures to deliver SWORD's functionality in a scalable and highly-available manner. A 1000-node ModelNet evaluation using a workload of measurements collected from PlanetLab shows that an architecture based on 4-node server cluster sites at network peering facilities outperforms a decentralized DHT-based resource discovery infrastructure for all but the smallest number of sites. While such a centralized architecture shows significant promise, we find that our decentralized implementation, both in emulation and running continuously on over 200 PlanetLab nodes, performs well while benefiting from the DHT's self-healing properties.