Designing a Runtime System for Volunteer Computing

Author

Anderson, David P. ; Christensen, Carl ; Allen, Bruce

Author_Institution

Berkeley Space Sci. Lab., California Univ., Berkeley, CA

fYear

2006

fDate

11-17 Nov. 2006

Firstpage

33

Lastpage

33

Abstract

Volunteer computing is a form of distributed computing in which the general public volunteers processing and storage to scientific research projects. BOINC, a middleware system for volunteer computing, is currently used by about 20 projects, to which 300,000 volunteers and 450,000 computers supply 350 TeraFLOPS of processing power. A BOINC client program runs on the volunteered hosts and manages the execution of applications. Together with a library linked to applications, it implements a runtime system providing process management, graphics control, checkpointing, file access, and other functions. This runtime system must handle widely varying applications, must provide features and properties desired by volunteers, and must work on many platforms. This paper describes the problems in designing a runtime system having these properties, and how these problems are solved in BOINC

Keywords

computer graphics; libraries; middleware; natural sciences computing; storage management; BOINC client program; Berkeley open infrastruture for network computing; distributed computing; graphics control; middleware system; process management; public volunteer processing; scientific research projects; volunteer computing; Application software; Biology computing; Computer graphics; Computer networks; Distributed computing; Middleware; Permission; Physics computing; Power system management; Productivity;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

SC 2006 Conference, Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE

Conference_Location

Tampa, FL

Print_ISBN

0-7695-2700-0

Electronic_ISBN

0-7695-2700-0

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SC.2006.24

Filename

4090207