Multi-tiered distributed computing platform

Abstract

A simple programmable Java platform-independent distributed computation system has been developed to exploit the free resources on computers linked together by a network. It is a multi-tiered distributed system model, which is unbounded in principal. The system consists of an n-ary tree of nodes where the internal nodes perform the scheduling and the leaves do the processing. The scheduler nodes communicate in a peer-to-peer manner and the processing nodes operate in a strictly client-server manner with their respective scheduler. The independent schedulers on each tier dynamically allocate resources between jobs based on the constantly changing characteristics of the underlying network. The system has been evaluated over a network of 90 personal computers with a bioinformatics application.

Copyright 2003 ACM.