Among all components of a grid or peer-to-peer application, the resources management is unavoidable. Indeed, new resources
like computational power or storage capacity must be quickly and efficiently integrated. This management can be achieved either
by a fully centralized way (BOINC) or by a hierarchical way (Globus, DIET). In the latter case, there is a greater flexibility and a greater scalability. But the counterpart is the difficulty to
design and to deploy such a solution, particularly if the resources are volatile.
In this article, we combine random walks and circulating word to derive a fully distributed solution to the resources management.
Random walks have proved their efficiency in distributed computing and are well suited to dynamical networks like peer-to-peer
or grid networks. There is no condition on nodes lifetime and we need only one application for each node.
An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/11915072_109.