The Construction of a Generic Large Scale Computation-Sharing Environment Based on Peer-to-Peer Overlay Network

Large scale resource sharing is the main object of gird computing and other Internet based computing modes. As a variant of computation grid, volunteer computing is playing an important role. Current volunteer computing systems are essentially center based, which leads to some scalability and accessibility problems. The goal of this paper is to build a generic and scalable volunteer computing environment, its scalability roots in a self organizing peer to peer overlay computing network, and its generity is based on a universal description mechanism of computing and task, a simple but efficient heuristic task scheduling algorithm, a fault tolerance mechanism and a user friendly GUI interface. This paper first briefly introduces the volunteer computing and its implementation, and then gives a detail explanation of the computing network constructing approach, including the simulations of small world network characteristics such as clustering coefficient and path length, and how these characteristics are selected in Paradropper computing task scheduling algorithm. Two small scale applications (Ray tracing and Mersenne prime number searching) are used to test Paradropper computing system. Simulation results show that, Paradropper computing network emerges outstanding self organizing characteristics and is very suitable for computing task scheduling. The preliminary small scale tests show that, compared to current center based global computing system such as Javelin, Paradropper environment probably leads to a new solution which could overcome the scalability and accessibility problems for internet based embarrassingly parallel applications.