Integrating categorical resource types into a P2P desktop grid system

We describe and evaluate a set of protocols that implement a distributed, decentralized desktop grid. Incoming jobs are matched with system nodes through proximity in an N-dimensional resource space. This work improves on prior work by (1) efficiently accommodating node and job characterizations that include both continuous and categorical resource types, and (2) scaling gracefully to large system sizes even with highly non-uniform distributions of job and node types. We use extensive simulation results to show that the resulting system handles both continuous and categorical constraints efficiently, and that the new scalability techniques are effective.