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

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 argue that hierarchical discovery architecture 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. The network is self-configuring as each node performs discovery itself. We describe the architecture of the system, demonstrate its operation and report on our first experiments with the system.