Distributed Resource Allocation for Contributory Systems

The book presents an approach to on-demand capacity expansion in communities of Internet users that aggregate their resources to achieve a common objective. Such communities are emerging as forms of organisation taking advantage of an increasing broadband access and computational capacity. Volunteer computing such as SETI@home, Collaborative Grids such as OurGrid and LaCOLLA, Ad-hoc and Peer-to-Peer Grids, such as P-Grid and the XGrid project from Apple, Open Grids such as those addressed by SORMA and Grid4All and many other approaches of Grid Computing based on Virtual Organisations are the focus of our work. These systems are characterised by the purpose of their participants, i.e. to achieve a common objective taking advantage of the aggregation of other resources. The cited systems, in contrast to high performance computing Grids, are open to new participants, which makes their behaviour unpredictable and dynamic, and resources are usually connected and disconnected spontaneously. While the critical aspect of high performance Grids is computational performance, stability and availability are the main issues for the systems addressed in this work.