Applying peer-to-peer techniques to grid replica location services

Peer-to-peer systems offer attractive system management properties, including the ability of components that join the network to self-organize; scalability up to tens of thousands of members; the ability of the network to automatically repair its topology after node failures; and techniques for maintaining redundant information to improve reliability and load balancing. We investigate applying peer-to-peer techniques to Grid services that are oriented toward resource discovery. In particular, we apply the Chord structured peer-to-peer overlay network to the Globus Replica Location Service, which allows registration and discovery of data replicas. We describe the design and performance of a Peer-to-Peer Replica Location Service (P-RLS) that uses the Chord algorithm to self-organize P-RLS servers and exploits the Chord overlay network to replicate P-RLS mappings adaptively. We present performance measurements and simulation results for the P-RLS system. We also discuss outstanding issues for applying peer-to-peer techniques to Grid resource discovery services. © Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006.