Zorilla: a peer-to-peer middleware for real-world distributed systems

Niels Drost, Rob V. van Nieuwpoort, Jason Maassen, Frank J. Seinstra, Henri E. Bal
2011 Concurrency and Computation  
The inherent complex nature of current distributed computing architectures hinders the widespread adoption of these systems for mainstream use. In general, users have access to a highly heterogeneous set of compute resources, which may include clusters, grids, desktop grids, clouds, and other compute platforms. This heterogeneity is especially problematic when running parallel and distributed applications. Software is needed which easily combines as many resources as possible into one coherent
more » ... omputing platform. In this paper we introduce Zorilla: Peer-to-Peer middleware that creates a single distributed environment from any available set of compute resources. Zorilla imposes minimal requirements on the resource used, is platform independent, and does not rely on central components. In addition to providing functionality on bare resources, Zorilla can exploit locally available middleware. Zorilla explicitly supports distributed and parallel applications, and allows resources from multiple sites to cooperate in a single computation. Zorilla makes extensive use of both virtualization and Peer-to-Peer techniques. We will demonstrate how virtualization and Peer-to-Peer combine into a simple design, while enhancing functionality and ease of use. Together, these techniques bring our goal a step closer: transparent, easy use of resources, even on very heterogeneous distributed systems.
doi:10.1002/cpe.1713 fatcat:xororwh5nbfb3khfnpmi7cvz6i