eScience is rapidly changing the way we do research. As a result, many research labs now need non-trivial computational power. Grid and voluntary computing are well-established solutions for this need. However, not all labs can effectively benefit from these technologies. In particular, small and medium research labs (which are the majority of the labs in the world) have a hard time using these technologies as they demand high visibility projects and/or high-qualified computer personnel. This paper describes OurGrid, a system designed to fill this gap. OurGrid is an open, free-to-join, cooperative Grid in which labs donate their idle computational resources in exchange for accessing other labs' idle resources when needed. It relies on an incentive mechanism that makes it in the best interest of participants to collaborate with the system, employs a novel application scheduling technique that demands very little information, and uses virtual machines to isolate applications and thus provide security. The vision is that OurGrid enables labs to combine their resources in a massive worldwide computing platform. OurGrid is in production since December 2004. Any lab can join it by downloading its software from http://www.ourgrid.org.
SUMMARYHere we present and evaluate relative accounting, an autonomous accounting scheme that provides accurate results even when the parties (consumer and provider) do not trust each other. Relative accounting relies on the observed relative performance amongst the parties. As such, the basic requirement to use it is that resource consumers must also be resource providers. Relative accounting is totally autonomous in the sense that it uses only local information, i.e. there is no exchange of information between the parties. This allows for the deployment of the autonomous accounting without requiring any sort of identification infrastructure, such as certificate authorities. Not requiring trust or sophisticated infrastructure makes relative accounting a perfect fit for peer-to-peer Grids, which aim to scale much further than traditional Grids by allowing free unidentified entry into the Grid. Our results show that relative accounting performs very close to a perfect accounting, whose implementation is infeasible in most systems, including those we target. Relative accounting was developed to work with OurGrid, a peer-to-peer Grid in production since December 2004, but it can also be used in other peer-to-peer Grids.
Large scale grid systems may provide multitudinous services, from different providers, whose quality of service will vary. Moreover, services appear (and disappear) in the grid with no central coordination. Thus, to find out the most suitable service to fulfill their needs, grid users must resort to Grid Information Services (GISs). These services allow users to submit rich queries that are normally composed of multiple attributes and range operations. The ability to efficiently execute complex searches in a scalable and reliable way is a key challenge for current GISs. Scalability issues are normally dealt with by using peer-to-peer technologies. However, the more reliable peer-to-peer approaches do not cater for rich queries in a natural way. On the other hand, approaches that can easily support these rich queries are less robust in the presence of faults. In this paper we focus on peer-to-peer GISs that efficiently support rich queries. In particular, we thoroughly analyze the impact of faults in one representant of such GISs, named NodeWiz. We propose extensions that increase NodeWiz's resilience to faults.
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