A recursive distributed topology discovery service for grid clients

Distributed application (e.g., grid-enabled application) performance can be improved by complementing the computational resource information advertised to the clients with network information (e.g., topology and link capacity). In this way, clients may choose the jointly optimal resources. This study focuses on how to provide clients with network information. The proposed method, namely the Recursive Distributed Topology Discovery Service (RD-TDS), utilizes a selected set of distributed beacons (i.e., measurement points) for network discovery. Each RD-TDS beacon recursively probes nodes that it has not discovered during its previous exploration steps but that have been discovered by other beacons. The exploration ends when each beacon does not have any new node to probe. The RD-TDS evaluation confirms the expected advantage of such method: closely approximating the full topology discovery with a limited number of active beacons. In addition, the proposed method rationale can be easily applied to many current network exploration tools.