An Advance Reservation Mechanism to Enhance Throughput in an Opportunistic High Performance Computing Environment

Opportunistic high performance computing environments have been widely used, especially by the academic community owing to the possibility of obtaining high processing power with low cost, considering that this type of distributed high performance environments uses idle computing resources of personal machines. However, excessive requests of resources allocation can be recurrent and can both degrade the performance of the system and make the process of resource request harder for the user, who might have to repeat this process until resources for execution are available. Therefore, this paper proposes the use of an advance reservation mechanism in an opportunistic environment. It aims to improve the use flow of opportunistic resources in order to offer the possibility of resources allocation for a long period of time and not only at the time of request. Case studies were carried out to illustrate the behavior of an opportunistic environment using the approach proposed here, and results showed the efficiency and validity of our proposal.