Design for a phase 0 network

Today's astronomers may use the telescopes and instruments of many observatories to execute their science observations. Discovering the distributed resources that are available is time consuming and error prone because astronomers must manually take facility information and match it to the needs of their science observations. While Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the proposal process are well supported by a wide variety of software tools, the initial phase of discovering what resources are available, Phase 0, suffers from a lack of software support. This paper describes and proposes the creation of a Phase 0 Network to fill this void. The network is built upon peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, showing that this new approach to distributed computing has viable uses in astronomy.