Distributed Shell over Peer-to-Peer Networks

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking uses a proliferate and powerful paradigm that replaces the traditional client/server communication model with an arbitrary communication model where all hosts or peers are both clients and servers. While P2P is well known for file sharing we developed a P2P system that provides distributed computing. We have developed and currently use a distributed shell over P2P which is a modified version of GNU-Bash that offers the user more computational power by transparently distributing commands over the P2P network. This paper presents the shell over P2P architecture and provides techniques we use to obtain I/O redirection and pipes, parametric computations, cross-file system and heterogeneous computing.