Decentralized Dynamic Host Configuration in Wide-Area Overlays of Virtual Workstations

Wide-area overlays of virtual workstations (WOWs) have been shown to provide excellent infrastructure for deploying high throughput computing environments on commodity desktop machines by (1) offering scalability to a large number of nodes, (2) facilitating addition of new nodes even if they are behind NATs/firewalls and (3) supporting unmodified applications and middleware. However, deployment of WOWs from scratch still requires setting up a bootstrapping network and managing centralized DHCP servers for IP address management. In this paper we describe novel techniques that allow multiple users to create independent, isolated virtual IP namespaces for their WOWs without requiring a dedicated bootstrapping infrastructure, and to provision dynamic host configuration (e.g. IP addresses) to unmodified DHCP clients without requiring the setup and management of a central DHCP server. We give qualitative and quantitative arguments to establish the feasibility of our approach.