Harnessing the power of P2P technology to build PC2 — An open and free cloud computing platform

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems are generally known as open and free systems since resources are often contributed from voluntary participants. Their limitation, however, is that they only support simple resource sharing such as file (storage) sharing and bandwidth sharing. On the other hand, based on virtualization techniques, cloud computing provides a more flexible mechanism to share all types of resources with no limitations. Nevertheless, the use of cloud computing usually requires a fee and is often locked-in to services of cloud computing providers (i.e., vendor lock-in). In this paper, we aim to combine P2P and cloud computing technologies to design and develop PC2, an open and free cloud computing platform that allows users to participate in any time to contribute as well as to consume sharing resources. While this combination inherits good advantages of these two technologies, it also avoid their disadvantages. As a proof-of-concept, we have developed a prototype for PC2 based on Eucalyptus, the most popular open source for building cloud computing platforms.