Celebrating Diversity in Volunteer Computing

The computing resources in a volunteer computing system are highly diverse in terms of software and hardware type, speed, availability, reliability, network connectivity, and other properties. Similarly, the jobs to be performed may vary widely in terms of their hardware and completion time requirements. To maximize system performance, the system´s job selection policy must accommodate both types of diversity.In this paper we discuss diversity in the context of world community grid (a large volunteer computing project sponsored by IBM) and BOINC, the middleware system on which it is based. We then discuss the techniques used in the BOINC scheduler to efficiently match diverse jobs to diverse hosts.