A JXTA-based P2P toolkit for managing compute power like electricity is the latest release from the Gridbus Project.
The Compute Power Market (CPM) Project uses an economics approach for managing computational resource consumers and providers around the world in peer-to-peer computing style, the project said. It allows application users to access computing power with the ease and simplicity of accessing electric power from a wall socket, the group said, and allows consumers to choose computing power and resource providers that offer cost-effective service on demand, "thus creating a competitive market approach to service-oriented P2P computing."
The CPM Project Team@JXTA - Rajkumar Buyya, Fazilah Haron and Chan Huah Yong of the University of Melbourne and Universiti Sains Malaysia - noted that P2P computing applications such as SETI@Home have been developed as vertically integrated, application-specific solutions, which means that distributed applications need to be constructed on a case-by-case basis. To overcome that limitation, Sun Microsystems developed the JXTA generic peer-to-peer protocol, they said. The JXTA technology can be used to develop secure high-level services and applications for file sharing, collaborative applications and distributed computing, among other uses.
The CPM team was formed to develop distributed computing services using a computational economy framework. The collaboration was launched in early 2001 to apply Grid economies architecture developed at Monash University for peer-to-peer computing. The Compute Power Market development activities are hosted through the Sun's JXTA initiative. The CPM technologies enable the creation of market-maker, which brings together a consumer and supplier, the team said.
CPM consists of two actors, provider and consumer, and follows layered architecture. A secure P2P protocol layer is provided by JXTA services. Generic components make use of JXTA services to discover peers and join peer groups based on a market concept. A CPM core engine consists of market, accounting, job management, and trader, and an application programming layer is included. In the application/presentation layer, the team built one simple GUI on top of these services to allow users (consumers) to submit Java class or .exe files to run remotely on a producer peer. Consumers and providers discover and select which market to join. Providers can publish resources that they are willing to trade. Consumers input their cost and deadline and submit the task to the matched provider.
Some documentation is available at http://grid.cs.usm.my/cpm.htm. The project has been carried out through an IRPA grant by the Malaysian Government (for the USM team), and a Sun Microsystems Academic grant (for the Melbourne team). For information on other components under development within the Gridbus Project and the GRIDS Lab at The University of Melbourne, see http://www.gridbus.org. For the, Malaysian e-Science project, visit http://grid.cs.usm.my/.
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