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Cohesion is the first of a new kind of modular Peer-to-Peer multi-application Desktop Grid computing platforms. By implementing the microkernel architectural pattern, Cohesion is especially suited for extension and customization even at the system level and thus can satisfy a wide variety of application-specific requirements.

Cohesion strives for pushing the limits of the Desktop Grid approach by enabling advanced parallel programming models. We focus on task-parallel programming models targeted towards Irregularly Structured Problems (ISPs). ISPs are parallel applications, whose computation and interaction patterns are input-dependent, unstructured and evolving during the computation. Prominent examples are discrete optimization, SAT Solving and constraint satisfaction problems in general. The client/server model supported by many existing Desktop Grid Computing platforms is too restricted to efficiently parallelize ISPs, since the centralized server becomes a sequential bottleneck for large numbers of clients. Thus, Cohesion provides a Distributed Task Pool leveraging the Peer-to-Peer operational model of Cohesion.