A new volunteer computing model for data-intensive applications

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.

A new volunteer computing model for data-intensive applications Articles