A Volunteer-Computing-Based Grid Environment for Connect6 Applications

This paper presents a volunteer computing based grid environment or called a desktop grid environment for Connect6 applications. The Connect6 application described in this paper is to let professional Connect6 players to develop or solve openings, based on two programs, NCTU6 and Verifier. NCTU6 is to make Connect6 moves, written by the team led by Wu. NCTU6 Verifier (abbr. Verifier), modified from NCTU6, is to verify whether one player wins in a given game position, or to generate the defensive moves if not winning in the position. Since both NCTU6 and Verifier consume huge amount of computation resources and requires on-demand responses, we design a desktop grid environment that provides players with on-demand computing through dynamic resource provisioning. The underlying desktop grid achieves high throughput computing by harvesting the idle CPU times on desktop computers connected to the Internet.