A Super-Peer Model for Building Resource Discovery Services in Grids: Design and Simulation Analysis

As deployed Grids increase from tens to thousands of nodes, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) techniques and protocols can be used to implement scalable services and applications. The super-peer model is a novel approach that helps the convergence of P2P models and Grid environments and can be used to deploy a P2P information service in Grids. A super-peer serves a single Virtual Organization (VO) in a Grid, and manages metadata associated to the resources provided by the nodes of that VO. Super-peers connect to each other to form a peer network at a higher level. This paper examines how the super-peer model can be used to handle membership management and resource discovery services in a multi-organizational Grid. A simulation analysis evaluates the performance of a resource discovery protocol; simulation results can be used to tune protocol parameters in order to increase search efficiency.