adhocGrid (or ad hoc grid) was firstly introduced during the First IBERIAN
GRID INFRASTRUCTURE CONFERENCE (Santiago de Compostela, Spain, May 14 to 16, 2007) during a Tutorial (slides and video) about the OurGrid middleware.
adhocGrid is a new approach for peer-to-peer (P2P) grid computing. There is a clear synergy between mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and peer-to-peer systems. From the MANETs, adhocGrid inherits the self-organizing property: Peers are free to join the ad hoc grid building an open grid infrastructure.
adhocGrid leverages on the OurGrid middleware. Even though OurGrid is free to join, it does require some centralized administration. One has to set up Peers and Workers, in addition to a centralized peer discovery service played by the Core Peer element.
To make the system scalable without relying
on any fixed infrastructure, both intra-grid and inter-grid
communication is multicast (Figure 1 illustrates the adhocGrid architecture).
Fig.1: adhocGrid architecture.
With adhocGrid, one should be
able to build on demand peer-to-peer grid computing systems, spanning a
single administrative domain or any set of domains over the Internet
(given that multicast or multicast tunneling mechanism is available).