YA: Fast and scalable discovery of idle CPUs in a P2P network

Discovery of large amounts of idle CPUs in fully distributed and shared Grid systems is needed in relevant applications and is still a challenging problem. In this paper we present a fast, scalable and efficient discovery protocol founded on a tree-based peer-to-peer (p2p) network with fault-tolerant capabilities and locality features. Each system node stores a good estimation of the number of CPUs that are available in its branch. Each node notifies its father about changes in this value only when it is meaningful enough. This allows low overhead and a stable behavior with concurrent and dynamic allocation of CPUs. This basic mechanism allows any node to launch a discovery process, that needs only to follow the information of free CPUs in each branch. Results from experiments and simulation tests, using a simple allocation method, show discovery time scaling logarithmically with the number of nodes.