Discouraging free riding in a peer-to-peer CPU-sharing grid

Grid computing has excited many with the promise of access to huge amounts of resources distributed across the globe. However, there are no largely adopted solutions for automatically assembling grids, and this limits the scale of today´s grids. Some argue that this is due to the overwhelming complexity of the proposed economy-based solutions. Peer-to-peer grids Iwve emerged as a less complex alternative. We are currently deploying OurGrid, one such peer-to-peer grid. OurGrid is a CPU-sharing grid that targets bag-of-tasks applications (i.e. parallel applications whose tasks are independent). In order to ease system deployment, OurGrid is based on a very lightweight autonomous reputation scheme. Free riding is an important issue for any peer-to-peer system. The aim is to show that OurGrid´s reputation system successfully discourages free riding, making it in each peer s own interest to collaborate with the peer-to-peer community. We show this in two steps. First, we analyze the conditions under which a reputation scheme can discourage free riding in a CPU-sharing grid. Second, we show that OurGrid´s reputation scheme satisfies these conditions, even in the presence of malicious peers. Unlike other distributed mechanisms for discouraging free riding, OurGrid´s reputation scheme achieves this without requiring a shared cryptographic infrastructure or specialized storage.