Globally Scheduling Volunteer Computing

David P. Anderson
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David P. Anderson: Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Future Internet, 2021, vol. 13, issue 9, 1-13

Abstract: Volunteer computing uses millions of consumer computing devices (desktop and laptop computers, tablets, phones, appliances, and cars) to do high-throughput scientific computing. It can provide Exa-scale capacity, and it is a scalable and sustainable alternative to data-center computing. Currently, about 30 science projects use volunteer computing in areas ranging from biomedicine to cosmology. Each project has application programs with particular hardware and software requirements (memory, GPUs, VM support, and so on). Each volunteered device has specific hardware and software capabilities, and each device owner has preferences for which science areas they want to support. This leads to a scheduling problem: how to dynamically assign devices to projects in a way that satisfies various constraints and that balances various goals. We describe the scheduling policy used in Science United, a global manager for volunteer computing.

Keywords: volunteer computing; high-throughput computing; scientific computing; scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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