Voltron A Peer To Peer Grid Networking Client Rice University Software Construction Methodology Dr. Stephen Wong, Instructor

Class Background 10 students 5 juniors, 3 seniors, 1 sophomore, 1 grad Meet 3 times a week for 1 hour SharePoint (discussions, bug tracking, goal management) SharePoint (directed conversation) MSN/AOL Messenger (emergencies)

The Problem Utilize the unused computing power implicit in today’s networks by creating webs of machines capable of sharing their resources.

Requirements Decentralized Network Join by connecting to any other node Distribute computing power across network Manual control Auto-scheduling, load-balancing Utilize Tablet PC technologies Varied applications

Project Background 1 semester development cycle All managed code (C#) Visual Studio.NET 2003, Vault, Flywheel Simulated business environment Customer meetings every other week Three teams, each with a team leader UI, Grid, TCP (Network)

Vision Researcher with a large, headless test bed Tester in a software development company Student with a large project

How to distribute processes? Parallel compiler Intercept calls to CLR Run completely separate processes Divide process into components Coordinated executions – “Workflows”

Why a Distributed File System? Get process output to other processes Code may not be located on remote node Remoting Would require major changes to existing code Would require that all code be on main machine  Not centralized Distributed file system Works with current programs Code is technically everywhere

Tying it together Create our own p2p network Complex but possible Would bottleneck other groups Pastry Joint research between Rice and MS Cambridge No documentation, non-intuitive code

Just one semester? Peer to peer network client Fully searchable, distributed file system Manual execution of remote processes Auto-load balancing scheduled execution Parallel fault-tolerant tasking Query-based views Intuitive “inking” input