Editorial: Special Issue on Global and Peer-to-Peer Computing

Abstract

Grid and P2P systems are different instances of distributed systems: while Grids are often motivated by intensive computations and required access to huge amounts of distributed data in a secure and trusted environment with quality of service guarantees, P2P systems are driven by large-scale dynamic collaborations in highly untrusted and unreliable environments. Since 2001, the Global and Peer to Peer Computing Workshop has been held annually along with the IEEE Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID) Conference to capture the fuzzy border between these areas and blur it even more, showing a much welcome exchange and enrichment of research ideas. The workshop popularity has increased continuously, making it one of the most successful workshops held at the CCGRID conference. This special issue includes extensions of the best papers of the 2005 workshop issue along with papers submitted directly to the journal. We received a total of 27 submissions and selected 7 papers for their high level scientific merits. One of the often cited differences between Grids and P2P systems is scale. While grids were traditionally developed around small and close professional communities, P2P systems were from the beginning intended to allow millions of anonymous users to share resources. However, the last years demonstrated an increased interest in scalable and large-scale grids. The articles in this special issue address the problem of larger grids from different directions, contributing ideas and software that may eventually take grids to truly global scale. The first direction is unrestricted participation: grids are often collaborations specialized on a set of predefined projects with limited access to participation. OurGrid, the system presented in “Labs of the World, Unite!!!”, is a free-to-join, already deployed peer-topeer grid. Anyone can join it to gain access to large amounts of computational power collected from the idle resources of all participants. Secure access to resources relies on an incentive mechanism that encourages participation and sharing, and uses virtual machines for resource isolation. An important problem stressed in large-scale systems is trust: while trust can be assumed through out of band means in small, controlled communities, it needs to be explicitly built and maintain in larger, more open groups. Two articles in this issue attack the problem of trust: in “Applying a Trust Brokering System to Resource Matchmaking in Public-Resource Grids,” Azzedin, Maheswaran and Mitra propose a trust J Grid Computing (2006) 4: 223–224 DOI 10.1007/s10723-006-9053-5