Efficient Scheduling Schemes for Sabotage-Tolerance in Volunteer Computing Systems

Volunteer computing is very promising to build large scale parallel computing systems from enormous number of computers over the Internet. In a volunteer computing system, sabotage-tolerance is an important issue because there may be malicious users on the Internet who sabotage system by intentionally submitting erroneous results. In this paper, we consider the task scheduling problem of volunteer computing systems which implement sabotage-tolerance mechanism. Although existing sabotage-tolerance mechanisms can guarantee the requirement of credibility for computing results, however, such mechanisms always cause a high performance slowdown in terms of overall execution time. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheduling mechanism called Priority Round Robin (PRR) that takes into account the computing capacity of each volunteer computer. By grouping volunteer computers that have similar computing capacity, the PRR scheduling mechanism can help to reduce overall execution time in comparision with the conventional Round Robin (RR) scheduling, as shown by our extensive simulation results.