What is P2P Computing

This chapter identifies challenges and requirements for resource sharing to support high performance distributed Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) systems. The chapter draws attention to two popular and important design paradigms: Grid and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing systems, which are evolving as two practical solutions to supporting wide-area resource sharing over the Internet. As a fundamental task of resource sharing, the efficient resource discovery is playing an important role in the context of the SOC setting. The chapter presents the resource discovery in Grid and P2P environments through an overview of related systems, both historical and emerging. The chapter then discusses the exploitation of both technologies for facilitating the resource discovery within large-scale distributed computing systems in a flexible, scalable, fault-tolerant, interoperable and security fashion.