Grid computing has emerged as an important new field, P2P computing is also another hot topic in distributed computing field. However, both of these two new fields are not yet mature and have limitations / bottlenecks in different aspects.

For Grid Computing,1) Most of the resources involved in the Grid are from computing / scientific facilities that have above average capabilities or for specific purpose. 2) The complexity of managing and using the Grid is too high for commodity use, thus influencing the pervasiveness of the Grid In particular, vast resources on the edge of Internet is hard to be use using current Grid middleware. 3) System communication in the Grid, in essence, is still in client/server mode,thus it is not totally immune to problems of traditional client/server mode systems.

For P2P computing, while it's famous for its ability of leverage the resources from the edge of Internet, and its pervasiveness. Most Current P2P systems are vertically integrated or only serving for simple resource sharing tasks, e.g. storage. The purpose of this project is to leverage the advantages of P2P computing into the Grid Environment.

In order to acheive the goal stated above, we propose a framework with a specialized P2P layer, on which each of the Grid Services and ordinary PCs willing to participating in Grid activities can be identified as a peer with the ability to provide or consume resources.

With the help of this framework, on the one hand, resources collected from PCs can be wrapped into Grid Services to other Grid Service Consumers, on the other hand, this layer can also serve as a P2P routing/messaging substrate for the upper Grid Layer. Figure 1. shows how the proposed system works

Figure 2 reveals part of the design of the system. The most important components in the final system are the Peers existing on the JXTA P2P network, and the JXTA agents for controlling the peers. While Peers communicating on the network in a P2P manner, the final request completion is done either in a Grid Service or in a PC. the logic of how the requests are completed is abstracted out as an interface (OperationResolver), allowing different forms of implantations.

This is an ongoing project, and the implemetation and evaluation of the system is still in progress. Finally, examples will be implemented to demostrate the ability of the system, and different forms of evaluation will also be conducted.

home>>