Grant : world wide grid powered by virtual ants

Grant is a research project conducted with the RTIC team from Polytech'Tours computing lab. This team main research interest is to study biomimetic alghorithms and their applications to internet.

Grant's goal is to build a world wide computing grid. There's already many CPU sharing systems like BOINC well known from its famous application SETI@home. As those systems, Grant permits computing power sharing to others but without any centralized task manager like some file sharing systems (P2P) avoid central query manager : each host linked to the grant network can handle tasks for others and submit tasks for its own purpose.

The main problem is the load balancing : find where each task will run to try to end it as soon as possible without locking volonteers hosts. Building a world wide grid can't be achieved with standard load balancing systems. those systems needs strictely indical computing nodes or a very high knowledge about each node at any time. Most also need a dedicated node supervisor to allocate tasks to available units.

By the way ants search for food, it is possible to break some of these needs. Each task query is handled by a virtual ant from node to node, until one accept the job. Like real ants use pheromons, a virtual ant add marks to its path during its trip. Then powerfull nodes will recieve more marks and become more attractive to other ants.

The grant network evolves from a random to a load balanced configuration without any supervisor or any hierarchical node relationship. One node failure has no effect at the grid scale other than loosing jobs running on the crashed node when failure occurs.