GridP2P: Resource usage in Grids and Peer-to-Peer systems

The last few years have witnessed huge growth in computer technology and available resources throughout the Internet. These resources can be used to run CPU-intensive applications requiring long periods of processing time. Grid systems allow us to take advantage of available resources lying over a network. However, these systems impose several difficulties to their usage (e.g. heavy authentication and configuration management); in order to overcome them, Peer-to-Peer systems provide open access making the Grid available to any user. Our solution consists of a platform for distributed cycle sharing which attempts to combine Grid and Peer-to-Peer models. A major goal is to allow any ordinary user to use remote idle cycles in order to speedup commodity applications. On the other hand, users can also provide spare cycles of their machines when they are not using them. Our solution encompasses the following functionalities: application management, job creation and scheduling, resource discovery, security policies, and overlay network management. The simple and modular organization of this system allows that components can be changed at minimum cost. In addition, the use of history-based policies provides powerful usage semantics concerning the resource management.