Experimental Investigation of a Peer-to-Peer-Based Architecture for Emerging Consumer Grid Applications

In recent years, the application of grid computing has become more common in the scientific and business communities and is likely to be open to the consumer market in the future. The achievement of this scheme, referred to as consumer grids, requires not only an efficient network paradigm for job transmission, but also a scalable and robust architecture, since there is a large number of dynamic resources and users (perhaps millions) and a high frequency of job requests in the consumer market. It has already been verified that the optical burst switching (OBS) network is a promising candidate for consumer grids. However, all the current architectures proposed for grids over OBS networks are client-server (C/S) based, carrying the disadvantages of poor scalability, poor fault tolerance, and low efficiency with increasing numbers of grid users and jobs. In order to address this issue, a novel peer-to-peer (P2P)-based architecture for optical grids is investigated, and this architecture is experimentally demonstrated on a labeled OBS (LOBS) network testbed. Results from theoretical analysis and experimental demonstration show that the proposed P2P-based architecture is feasible, scalable, and efficient for grid applications. Moreover, it outperforms C/S-based architectures for emerging large-scale consumer-oriented grid applications.