Flexible Resource Discovery for Decentralized P2P and Volunteer Computing Systems

Resource discovery mechanisms are key for distributed computing. Traditional approaches use dedicated servers to store information about the whole system and make all the scheduling decisions. Many mechanisms exist for decentralized environments, based on distributing the information in a certain way over a structured overlay network. This usually creates complex relationships between the distribution of the data to be stored and the performance of the system. In this paper, we present a method for resource discovery with the simplicity and power of centralized approaches, designed for decentralized systems formed by non-dedicated resources. We show that it provides a constant look-up latency for frequent resources in the average case, while causing a low overhead and tolerating the levels of churn that are to be expected from non-dedicated resources.