Guard: Gossip used for autonomous resource detection

A growing trend in the development and deployment of grid computing systems is decentralization. Decentralizing these systems helps make them more scalable and robust, but poses several challenges. In this paper we address one such problem-that of locating computing resources meeting specified requirements in a large scale heterogenous system. The heterogeneous and dynamic nature, coupled with their multiple occurrences of these resources, makes the problem distinct from traditional data location problems found in the context of content-sharing systems. We propose GUARD (Gossip Used for Autonomous Resource Detection), a protocol that uses gossiping between neighbors to propagate the current knowledge of distances from available resources. GUARD is autonomous (all decisions are made locally, using knowledge based only on interaction with immediate neighbors) and does not make any assumptions about the underlying network topology. Our simulations sho