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.