Democratizing Resource-Intensive e-Science Through Peer-to-Peer Grid Computing

Abstract

The new ways of doing science rooted on the unprecedented processing, communication, and storage infrastructure that became available to scientists are collectively called e-Science. Due to their nature, most e-Science activities can only be successfully performed if researchers have access to high-performance computing facilities. Grid and voluntary computing are well-established solutions that cater to this need, but are not accessible to all labs and institutions. Peer-to-peer (P2P) grid computing has been proposed to address this very problem. In this chapter, we share our experience in developing a P2P grid middleware called OurGrid and deploying it to build the OurGrid Community. We describe the mechanisms that effectively promote collaboration and allow the assemblage of large P2P grids from the contributions of thousands of small sites. This includes a thorough review of the main mechanisms required to support the execution of bag-of-tasks applications on top of P2P grids: accounting, scheduling, security, and data caching. Besides, we discuss ways to allow P2P grids to interoperate with service grids. We also report a success case in the utilization of the OurGrid middleware in the context of e-Science. Finally, we summarize our experience in this area indicating the lessons we have learned, the present challenges, and future directions of research.