Towards a Robust and Fault-Tolerant Multicast Discovery Architecture for Global Computing Grids

Abstract

Global grid systems with potentially millions of services require a very effective and efficient service discovery/ location mechanism. Current grid environments, due to their smaller size, rely mainly on centralised service directories. Large-scale systems need a decentralised service discovery system that operates reliably in a dynamic and error-prone environment. Work has been done in studying flat, decentralised discovery architectures. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical discovery architecture that provides a more scalable and efficient approach. We describe our design rationale for a k-ary tree-based fault-tolerant discovery architecture that also acts as an intelligent routing network for client requests. We show that it is possible to provide ad hoc multicast discovery of services even without end-to-end multicast availability. The system provides clients with the ability to search for services with incomplete information using descriptive service attributes. Our results demonstrate that this approach is well suited to wide-area discovery if fast discovery, high availability, scalability and good performance are crucial requirements.