A Fault Tolerant Volunteer Selection Mechanism Based on Collective Impact of Resources for Volunteer Computing

Computing (VC) is an exciting discipline that has allowed the use of millions of volunteers connected through internet to participate in any project by donating their processing cycles. VC systems have lot of potential but also few challenges such as volunteers are not managed centrally, they can submit erroneous results (intentionally or unintentionally) or can quit at any time even while executing assigned tasks. The simple solution is to select volunteer carefully keeping in view the past performance and other measures. In this paper, we have proposed a fault tolerant framework for selecting the best available volunteer. The proposed framework consists of a volunteer grouping mechanism (based on the collective impact of processing cycles, memory etc, spot checking and make span statistics) and replication (number of replicas to be generated of a particular task) policies for the individual groups. The results have shown that the proposed mechanism has successfully decreased the make span of individual tasks and increased the overall system performance.