Towards Real-Time Result Verification Using Checkpointing in Volunteer Computing Systems

Volunteer Computing is a form of network based distributed computing, which allows public participants to share their idle computing resources, and helps run computationally expensive projects. Many existing volunteer computing platforms consist of millions of users, providing huge amount of memory and processing. Due to the rapid growth in the volunteer computing projects, more researchers have been attracted to study and improve the existing volunteer computing system using heterogeneous set of resources. Also, the task distribution and result verification policies incorporated in the popular volunteer computing frameworks are not efficient because much of the user computation is wasted. This paper highlights the drawbacks of existing schemes and proposes a framework for real-time task division, distribution, early detection and mitigation of faults in a volunteer computing system. The main motivation behind this research is to devise a methodology that reduces the overhead incurred by replication. The check pointing scheme proposed triggers intermediate result verification and the grouping of resources aids in the efficient scheduling of work units which improves accuracy of the volunteer cloud. The research will enable the research community to study the available schemes used in volunteer computing and help them fill gaps in existing research.