Coordination and P2P computing

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) refers to a class of systems and/or applications that use distributed resources in a decentralized and autonomous manner to achieve a goal. A number of successful applications, like BitTorrent (for file and content sharing) and SETI@Home (for distributed computing) have demonstrated the feasibility of this approach. As a new form of distributed computing, P2P computing has the same coordination problems as other forms of distributed computing. Coordination has been considered an important issue in distributed computing for a long time and many coordination models and languages have been developed. This research focuses on how to solve coordination problems in P2P computing. In particular, it is to provide a seamless P2P computing environment so that the migration of computation components is transparent. This research extends Manifold, an event-driven coordination model, to meet P2P computing requirements and integrates the P2P-Manifold model into an existing platform. The integration hides the complexity of the coordination model and makes the model easy to use.