Towards a formal model of volunteer computing systems

  • Authors:

  • Yu Wang;Haiwu He;Zhijian Wang

  • Affiliations:

  • INRIA, LIP, ENS Lyon, 46 avenue d'Italie, 69364 Cedex 07, France;INRIA, LIP, ENS Lyon, 46 avenue d'Italie, 69364 Cedex 07, France;College of Computer and Information Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing 210098, China

  • Venue:
  • IPDPS '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel&Distributed Processing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Volunteer Computing is a form of distributed computing in which the general public offers processing power and storage to scientific research projects. A large variety of Volunteer Computing Systems (VCS) have been proposed in the literature which use different architectures from client/server to P2P. This paper aims to provide a formal abstraction of VCS. At first, we identify three key roles played by VCS computing resources. Then, a formal model and related methods concerning Volunteer Computing are introduced. Relationships among elements are also characterized, based on set theory and operational reduction rules. We apply this model to describe a part of the XtremWeb protocol. Our results can help to lay a substantial foundation for the research on formalisms of Volunteer Computing.