Understanding Resource Provisioning for ClimatePrediction.net

Peer-to-peer computing, involving the participation of thousands of general purpose, public computers, has established itself as a viable paradigm for executing loosely-coupled, complex scientific applications requiring significant computational resources. ClimatePrediction.net is an excellent demonstrator of this technology, having attracted hundreds of thousands of users from more than 200 countries for the efficient and effective execution of complex climate prediction models. This paper is concerned with understanding the underlying compute resources on which ClimatePrediction.net commonly executes. Such a study is advantageous to three different stakeholders, namely the application developers, the project participants and the project administrators. This is the first study of this kind, and while offering general conclusions with specific reference to ClimatePrediction.net, it also illustrates the benefits of such work to scalability analysis of other peer-to-peer projects.