Peer-to-peer grid computing with the OurGrid Community

Abstract. For a number of research and commercial computational problems, it is possible to use as much computing power as available to speed the resolution of the problem through parallel processing. Grid computing has done much in the direction of enabling users to use the computing power of resources across administrative boundaries for solving this kind of problem. However, not much has been done to solve the precedent problem of gaining access to resources spread across several institutions. We have addressed this issue in the OurGrid Toolkit developing the OurGrid Community, a peer-to-peer network for sharing computational power. The goal of this system is to provide easy access to large amounts of computational resources for anyone who needs them. All participants contribute idle resources to form a shared pool from which all can benefit. To motivate the contribution to this pool, the OurGrid Community uses an allocation mechanism that rewards the peers that donate more to the system. This paper describes the OurGrid Community and its first deployment in a grid across Brazil called Pauá, which is presently being used by several Brazilian research institutes. 1