Towards fully autonomic peer-to-peer systems

Large-scale distributed applications are becoming more and more demanding in terms of efficiency and flexibility of the technological infrastructure, for which traditional solutions based on the client/server paradigm are not suitable. The peer-to-peer paradigm provides an appealing solution to this problem, allowing to deploy robust networks of collectors, providers and consumers of resources. One step beyond, in an autonomic computing vision, the structure of each peer, or at least its configuration, may be dynamically adjusted by an adaptive plan which determines successive re-configurations in response to the environment, and turns the P2P network in a complex adaptive system (CAS). We analyze a Grid Computing architecture whose resource sharing mechanisms are based on this framework.