The Organic Grid

Desktop grids have recently been used to perform some of the largest computations in the world and have the potential to grow by several more orders of magnitude. However, current approaches to utilizing desktop resources require either centralized servers or extensive knowledge of the underlying system, limiting their scalability.

We propose a biologically inspired and fully-decentralized approach to the organization of computation that is based on the autonomous scheduling of strongly mobile agents on a peer-to-peer network. Our approach achieves the following design objectives: near-zero knowledge of network topology, zero knowledge of system status, autonomous scheduling, distributed computation, lack of specialized nodes. Every node is equally responsible for scheduling and computation, both of which are performed with practically no information about the system.

We have implemented an extension of Java with strong mobility that allows multi-threaded agents to migrate with all of their execution state by translating Java with strong mobility into Java with weak mobility. We built a prototype grid infrastructure, the Organic Grid, in which an application is scheduled by encapsulating it in an agent together with a scheduler specific to the application characteristics. Similar to other desktop grids, the Organic Grid can be deployed in a screen saver.

We are planning on exploring the use of our mobility translator for check-pointing applications on large clusters. Our decentralized grid management approach currently concentrates on finding compute resources for tasks. We are planning on generalizing this approach to take data movement into consideration as well.

Collaborators

• Mario Lauria, Microsoft Research, University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology, Trento, Italy

Former Students

• Arjav J. Chakravarti (PhD, June 2004), IIM Ahmedabad
• John T. Glass
• Rajneesh Khambham (MS, December 2006)
• Anindya Poddar
• Xiaojin Wang (MS, December 2001), Amazon.com

Publications

2007

• Self-Organizing Scheduling on the Organic Grid
  A.J. Chakravarti, G. Baumgartner, M. Lauria. In Manish Parashar, Salim Hariri (eds.), Autonomic Computing: Concepts, Infrastructure, and Applications, CRC Press, 2007, Chapter 19, pp. 389-411.

2006

• The Organic Grid: Self-Organizing Computational Biology on Desktop Grids
  A.J. Chakravarti, G. Baumgartner, M. Lauria. In Albert Zomaya (ed.), Parallel Computing for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology: Models, Enabling Technologies, and Case Studies, John Wiley & Sons, February 2006, Chapter 27. pp. 671-703.
• Self-Organizing Scheduling on the Organic Grid
  A.J. Chakravarti, G. Baumgartner, M. Lauria. International Journal on High-Performance Computing Applications, Vol. 20, No. 1, January 2006, pp. 115-130.

2005

• The Organic Grid: Self-Organizing Computation on a Peer-to-Peer Network
  A.J. Chakravarti, G. Baumgartner, M. Lauria. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A, Vol. 35, No. 3, May 2005, pp. 373-384.

2004

• Application-Specific Scheduling for the Organic Grid
  A.J. Chakravarti, G. Baumgartner, M. Lauria. In Proceedings of the 5th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing (Grid '04), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 8 November 2004, pp. 146-155.
  Also available as Technical Report OSU-CISRC-4/04-TR23, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University, April 2004.
• The Organic Grid: Self-Organizing Computation on a Peer-to-Peer Network
  A.J. Chakravarti, G. Baumgartner, M. Lauria. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC '04), New York, NY, 17-18 May 2004, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 96-103.
  An extended version of this paper is available as Technical Report OSU-CISRC-10/03-TR55, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University, October 2003.
• Application-Specific Scheduling for the Organic Grid
  A.J. Chakravarti, G. Baumgartner, M. Lauria. Technical Report OSU-CISRC-4/04-TR23, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University, April 2004.

2003

• The Organic Grid: Self-Organizing Computation on a Peer-to-Peer Network
  A.J. Chakravarti, G. Baumgartner, M. Lauria. Technical Report OSU-CISRC-10/03-TR55, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University, October 2003.
• Implementation of Strong Mobility for Multi-Threaded Agents in Java
  A.J. Chakravarti, X. Wang, J.O. Hallstrom, G. Baumgartner. In Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP '03), Koahsiung, Taiwan, 6-9 October 2003, IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 321-330.
  An extended version of this paper is available as Technical Report OSU-CISRC-2/03-TR06, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University, October 2003.
• Implementation of Strong Mobility for Multi-Threaded Agents in Java
  A.J. Chakravarti, X. Wang, J.O. Hallstrom, G. Baumgartner. Technical Report OSU-CISRC-2/03-TR06, Dept. of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University, March 2003.

2001

• Reliability Through Strong Mobility
  X. Wang, J. Hallstrom, G. Baumgartner. In Proceedings of the 7th ECOOP Workshop on Mobile Object Systems: Development of Robust and High Confidence Agent Applications (MOS '01), Budapest, Hungary, 18 June 2001, pp. 1-13.