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. We built a 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. We are currently working on a screen saver for deploying the Organic Grid to desktop PCs.

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Gerald Baumgartner
Last modified: Sat Aug 20 01:34:00 CDT 2005