A new volunteer computing model for data‐intensive applications. (20th June 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Alonso‐Monsalve, Saúl; García‐Carballeira, Félix; Calderón, Alejandro
• Other Names: Carretero Jesus guestEditor.; Garcia‐Blas Javier guestEditor.; Nakano Koji guestEditor.; Mueller Peter guestEditor.; Grosu Daniel guestEditor.; Zheng Sheng guestEditor.; Xu Li guestEditor.; Xu Zheng guestEditor.; Yen Neil guestEditor.; Sugumaran Vijayan guestEditor.
• Is Part Of: Concurrency and computation. Volume 29:Number 24(2017)
• Page Start: n/a
• Page End: n/a
• Publication Date: 2017-06-20
• Subjects: BOINC -- data locality -- data volunteers -- simulation -- throughput -- volunteer computing; Parallel processing (Electronic computers) -- Periodicals; Parallel computers -- Periodicals; 004.35
• DOI: 10.1002/cpe.4198
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1532-0626

Abstract

Summary: Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which ordinary people donate computing resources to scientific projects. BOINC is the main middleware system for this type of distributed computing. The aim of volunteer computing is that organizations be able to attain large computing power thanks to the participation of volunteer clients instead of a high investment in infrastructure. There are projects, like the ATLAS@Home project, in which the number of running jobs has reached a plateau, due to a high load on data servers caused by file transfer. This is why we have designed an alternative, using the same BOINC infrastructure, in order to improve the performance of BOINC projects that have reached their limit due to the I/O bottleneck in data servers. This alternative involves having a percentage of the volunteer clients running as data servers, called data volunteers, that improve the performance of the system by reducing the load on data servers. In addition, our solution takes advantage of data locality, leveraging the low network latencies of closer machines. This paper describes our alternative in detail and shows the performance of the solution, applied to 3 different BOINC projects, using a simulator of our own, ComBoS.