Enduring Institutions and Self-Organising Trust-Adaptive Systems for an Open Grid Computing Infrastructure

A Desktop Grid provides a distributed computing infrastructure for scheduling and processing large-scale tasks in a more efficient manner, by pooling multiple processor and storage resources. To avoid the problem of free-riding, the idea of Trusted Desktop Grid Computing investigates how localised trust decisions help agents to form a self-organising 'trusted community'. Although these communities can be resistant to free-riding and other 'anti-social' forms of behaviour, there are still system states where the breakdown of trust results in the community being unable to maintain interaction and mutual cooperation. One approach to avoiding such entropy is to collectivise knowledge and formalise behaviour in conventional rules defined by an institution. Starting from Ostrom's principles for forming enduring institutions, this paper analyses the extent to which these principles are already encapsulated by trusted communities, and proposes mechanisms to capture those that are not. We propose to use the principles of enduring institutions to develop an enhanced form of self-organising, trust-adaptive system which in turn can provide the foundations for the next generation of open grid computing infrastructures.