P3: P2P-based middleware enabling transfer and aggregation of computational resources

Abstract

This paper presents middleware enabling mutual and equal transfer of computing power between individuals, as in the original idea behind P2P, while also supporting large-scale distributed computation utilizing heterogeneous PCs. This goal is strongly supported by a network overlay over which peers can communicate with each other directly and bidirectionally. We made use of a general-purpose P2P library, JXTA, supporting the common requirements of P2P software, including network overlay. Other features of the P2P library, such as ad-hoc self-organization, discovery and grouping of peers, also support our middleware efficiently. In this paper, we propose and evaluate an application of those P2P concepts to virtual resource transfer and parallel computation with aggregated resources. However, such a P2P library imposes a certain amount of overhead on the middleware in terms of communication performance. Measured communication performance and throughput of an application program shows the feasibility of the application of P2P concepts. The middleware achieves 100 /spl times/ 10/sup 6/ bps communication performance and over a 20 fold increase in speed with 32 computers, even though the granularity of workunits is as fine as less than a second.