Computing Seminar

Peer-to-Peer Grid Databases for Service and Resource Discovery

Wolfgang Hoschek, CERN/IT

Abstract

The convergence of Grid Computing, Peer-to-Peer Computing, Distributed Databases and Web Services promises powerful emerging synergies. Grids are collaborative distributed Internet systems characterized by large scale, heterogeneity, multiple autonomous administrative domains, unreliable components and frequent dynamic change. Here, it is desirable to maintain and query dynamic and timely information about active participants such as services, resources and user communities. The web services vision promises that programs are made more flexible, adaptive and powerful by querying Internet databases (registries) at runtime in order to discover information and network attached building blocks, enabling the assembly of distributed higher-level components.

However, in a large cross-organizational system, the set of information tuples is partitioned over many such distributed databases, for reasons including autonomy, scalability, availability, performance and security. This suggests the use of Peer-to-Peer (P2P) query technology. We describe a P2P framework and network protocol that allow to express specific discovery applications for a wide range of data types, node topologies (e.g. ring, tree, graph), query languages (e.g. XQuery, SQL), query response modes, neighbor selection policies, pipelining, timeout and scope policies.

About the speaker: Wolfgang Hoschek is a CERN Fellow in the IT/DB Group. He received a M.S ('97) from the University of Linz, Austria and will receive a Ph.D ('02) shortly from the Technical University of Vienna, Austria. He is working for the Grid Data Management Group (WP2) of the European Data Grid Project (EDG), focusing on Grid Computing, Peer-to-Peer Computing, Distributed Databases, Service Discovery, Web Services as well as Systems Architecture and Design.