The computational Grid has popularized the idea of sharing resources such as compute cycles, storage space, and data across administrative domains. Grid resources traditionally encompassed dedicated super-computers, clusters, or storage units. The growing computational and storage capabilities of the modern everyday-use computers such as desktop and laptop machines make them potential candidates for serving as nodes in a federated resource sharing system. However, managing such resources poses several major challenges since such resources can be heterogeneous, highly dynamic, and with distinct sharing preferences, and can pose various security challenges due to cross-domain sharing.

In recent years, peer-to-peer (p2p) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for constructing large-scale distributed systems. It provides self-organization, decentralization, redundancy, efficient locality-aware routing, and eliminates much of the cost, difficulty, and time required to deploy, configure, and maintain large-scale distributed systems. Previously, the p2p paradigm has been limited to file sharing applications. This thesis explores the potential of the powerful p2p paradigm in Grid computing and proposes a p2p framework for discovering and managing federated dynamic resources.

The framework supports a two-level hierarchical organization, in which nodes within each administrative domain are organized into a local p2p overlay, and the manager nodes from individual domains form the higher level p2p overlay. Such organization retains the sovereignty of resources within each domain while allowing flexible sharing of local resources with remote clusters. The framework is successfully applied to develop two Grid services. First, the framework is applied to develop a self-organizing distributed compute cycle sharing service that allows users to utilize local and remote resources even in the presence of resources leaving and joining the system. Second, the framework is used to develop a fault-tolerant distributed storage system that harvests unused disk space on desktop machines or cluster nodes. The distributed storage retains the Network File System interface which allows users to transparently utilize the distributed storage via the standard NFS mechanisms. The thesis presents the design and evaluation of these services, and also investigates the issues of secure and fair resource sharing across domains.