Optical Burst Switching for Consumer Grids

Advances in both computer hardware and software has given end users access to increasingly complex applications. However, this evolution imposes a continuous cycle of replacement and renewal of infrastructure, which is both in terms of required resources as from an economical viewpoint a wasteful process. We aim to eliminate this inefficiency through the use of consumer grids, in which users are given access to powerful computing and storage resources, all connected through a high-performance optical burst switched network. Since these consumer grids should be accessible by the public at large, the main requirements are massive scalability, a robust design, and the delivery of non-trivial amounts of computing resources. We show how the basic functional requirements of our architecture can be realised, and demonstrate several extensions which permit the full spectrum of end user applications on our platform