Volunteer Computing

Project SETI@HOME has proven to be one of the biggest successes of distributed computing during the last years. With a quite simple approach SETI manages to process large volumes of data using a vast amount of distributed computer power. To extend the generic usage of this kind of distributed computing tools, BOINC is being developed. In this paper we propose HEP@HOME, a BOINC version tailored to the specific requirements of the High Energy Physics (HEP) community. The HEP@HOME will be able to process large amounts of data using virtually unlimited computing power, as BOINC does, and it should be able to work according to HEP specifications. In HEP the amounts of data to be analyzed or reconstructed are of central importance. Therefore, one of the design principles of this tool is to avoid data transfer. This will allow scientists to run their analysis applications and taking advantage of a large number of CPUs. This tool also satisfies other important requirements in HEP, namely, s...

Grid computing provides integration of different environments, creating a unified system, where organizations can share, manage and access different resources regardless of where they are located. However, the lack of integration among different grid computing systems hinders total exploitation of resources. This work investigates and develops an interface for the integration of two heterogeneous grid computing environments: Globus and InteGrade. Such integration transparently increases computational power. Users will be able to submit jobs through both grid environments and applications will be executed in either Globus or InteGrade grids, or even in both.

Today advances in information technology are the basis of modern societies and internalised into live as fundamentally as basic commodities. Beyond, the creation of global cyber or virtual societies has led to entire new aspects of what should now be called e-life. The path to a virtualised world is accelerating in an enormous manner and classical society is rapidly shifting into an e-society. This has implications for all aspects of life and its holistic understanding and its perception by human ecology. New questions therefore arise and need to be addressed by human ecology ranging from classical questions as e.g. resource sharing and the tragedy of the commons in cyber space, to the relational and transformation aspects of archaic fundamentals of humans as e.g. deep psychology based religious aspects or perception of reality into e-life. Consequently, the classical human ecology will also transform to e-human ecology. Despite the increased transformation of societies to cyber or virtual e-societies this phenomenon has been rarely investigated and understood due to lacking higher education and research in respect to human ecology. E.g. the huge amounts of money on the order of billions invested currently in the implementation of so called basic grid infrastructures for computing power, data storage and application sharing. The European Union estimates that such technologies will reach a market volume of several billion euros world wide by 2010. To build these infrastructures e.g. two e-social influences have to be overcome: i) the sharing attitude and socialization of the individual, i.e. the micro-sociality, and ii) the organization culture of the embedding institutions, i.e. the macrosociality. However, the implications from e-human ecology, are neither established nor even investigated , thus they could contribute to this transformation to e-society. Consequently, curricula need to be set-up in e-human ecology and elsewhere to address these questions beyond analysis and understanding of the developmental path of mankind so far. The arising future and its recursive influence on society have to be addressed in the present by reflecting on these future aspects to be able to link ereality and e-society with reality and society.

Many areas of scientific computing-for example, virtual drug screening, climate modeling, and radio astronomy-involve 'high-throughput computing' (HTC): large numbers of independent jobs, with the goal of high rate of job completion rather than low turnaround time of individual jobs. Various computing resources are available for such workloads; for example, a scientist could buy and operate a Linux cluster, or rent nodes on a commercial cloud.

Remote sensing from a single integrated system that produces false alerts and deadlock conditions has become one of the issues of autonomous vehicles. It believes that the cloud-based vehicle control system is effective as it would be required to implement a number of vehicles since it can gather intelligence for synchronization from sensors throughout several vehicles. Moreover, mobile edge computing (MEC) has increasingly achieved concern in the upcoming generation wireless network, including 5G, as cloud-based connectivity has inherent difficulty in long-haul connectivity prone to protracted delay and packet failure caused by interference. In this paper, it suggests an EC based method for vehicle charging, in sequence with a broad data-driven development model. Mobility-aware Edge Computing servers connect with ineffectively found vehicles to transmit the expected accessibility of loading by CSs, gather big data moving vehicles, and introduce decentralized big data, and optimizes computing. And if the percentage of edge server access schedule to cloud improving the efficiency is reduced to 50%, it will enhance the same reliability as edge control system constant monitoring.

With ever-new technologies emerging also the amount of information to be stored and processed is growing exponentially and is believed to be always at the limit. In contrast, however, huge resources are available in the IT sector alike e.g. the renewable energy sector, which are often even not at all used. This under-usage bares any rational especially in the IT sector where e.g. virtualisation and grid approaches could be fast implemented due to the great technical and fast turnover opportunities. Here, we describe this obvious paradox for the first time as the Inverse Tragedy of the Commons, in contrast to the Classical Tragedy of the Commons where resources are overexploited. From this perspective the grid IT sector attempting to share resources for better efficiency, reveals two challenges leading to the heart of the paradox: i) From a macro perspective all grid infrastructures involve not only mere technical solutions but also dominantly all of the autopoietic social subsystems ranging from religion to policy. ii) On the micro level the individual players and their psychology and risk behaviour are of major importance for acting within the macro autopoietic framework. Thus, the challenges of grid implementation are similar to those of e.g. climate protection. This is well described by the classic Human Ecology triangle and our extension to a rectangle: environment-individual-society-environment. Extension of this classical interdisciplinary field of basic and applied research to an e-Human Grid Ecology rational, allows the Inverse Tragedy of the Commons of the grid sector to be understood and approached better and implies obvious guidelines in the day-today management for grid and other (networked) resources, which is of importance for many fields with similar paradoxes as in (e-)society.

The article examines wages in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT). Based on the so-called ISPV data (adjusted for inflation), CZSO and Eurostat data, several analyses were performed. The main conclusions are: (1) The number of ICT workers grew faster, their share in total employment increased from 2.2% to 3.9%. (2) From 2008 to 2013, the overall trend in wages is declining and they have been growing significantly since 2014 (influenced by both economic growth and falling inflation). (3) Wages of ICT specialists (CZ ISCO 25) grew considerably faster than those of ICT technicians (CZ ISCO 35). 4) Wages for the entire ICT and for the CZ-ISCO 25 category grew faster than GDP. (5) The gender pay gap in the Czech Republic is among the highest among the countries surveyed, although in 2019 it decreased compared to 2008. (6) Within the Czech Republic, the differences between the salaries of men and women in ICT are smaller than for the entire economy.

Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which ordinary people donate computing resources to scientific projects. BOINC is the main middleware system for this type of distributed computing. The aim of volunteer computing is that organizations be able to attain large computing power thanks to the participation of volunteer clients instead of a high investment in infrastructure. There are projects, like the ATLAS@Home project, in which the number of running jobs has reached a plateau, due to a high load on data servers caused by file transfer. This is why we have designed an alternative, using the same BOINC infrastructure, in order to improve the performance of BOINC projects that have reached their limit due to the I/O bottleneck in data servers. This alternative involves having a percentage of the volunteer clients running as data servers, called data volunteers, that improve the performance of the system by reducing the load on data servers. In addition, our solution takes advantage of data locality, leveraging the low network latencies of closer machines. This paper describes our alternative in detail and shows the performance of the solution, applied to three different BOINC projects, using a simulator of our own, ComBoS.

Mobile cloud computing is a paradigm that delivers applications to mobile devices by using cloud computing. In this way, mobile cloud computing allows for a rich user experience; since client applications run remotely in the cloud infrastructure, applications use fewer resources in the user mobile devices. In this paper we present a new mobile cloud computing model, in which part of the resources of the cloud are provided by platforms of volunteer devices, inspired in both volunteer computing and mobile edge computing paradigms. These platforms may be hierarchical, based on the capabilities of the volunteer devices and the requirements of the services provided by the clouds. We also describe the orchestration between the volunteer platform and the public, private or hybrid clouds. As we show, this new model can be an inexpensive solution to different application scenarios, highlighting its benefits in cost savings, elasticity, scalability, load balancing, and efficiency. Moreover, with the evaluation performed we also show that our proposed model is a feasible solution for cloud services that have a large number of mobile users.

Volunteer Computing is a type of distributed computing in which ordinary people donate their idle computer time to science projects like SETI@home, Climateprediction.net and many others. In a similar way, Desktop Grid Computing is a form of distributed computing in which an organization uses its existing computers to handle its own long-running computational tasks. BOINC is the main middleware that provides a software platform for volunteer computing and desktop grid computing, and it became generalized as a platform for distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics. In this paper we present a complete simulator of BOINC infrastructures, called ComBoS. Although there are other BOINC simulators, none of them allow us to simulate the complete infrastructure of BOINC. Our goal was to create a complete simulator that, unlike the existing ones, could simulate realistic scenarios taking into account the whole BOINC infrastructure, that other simulators do not consider: projects, servers, network, redundant computing, scheduling, and volunteer nodes. The outputs of the simulations allow us to analyze a wide range of statistical results, such as the throughput of each project, the number of jobs executed by the clients, the total credit granted and the average occupation of the BOINC servers. The paper describes the design of ComBoS and the results of the validation performed. This validation compares the results obtained in ComBoS with the real ones of three different BOINC projects (Einstein@home, SETI@home and LHC@home). Besides, we analyze the performance of the simulator in terms of memory usage and execution time. The paper also shows that our simulator can guide the design of BOINC projects, describing some case studies using ComBoS that could help designers verify the feasibility of BOINC projects.

One of the most significant issues in Internet of Things (IoT) cloud computing is scheduling tasks. Recent developments in IoT-based technologies have led to a meteoric rise in the demand for cloud storage. In order to load the IoT services onto cloud resources efficiently even while satisfying the requirements of the applications, sophisticated planning methodologies are required. This is important because several processes must be well prepared on different virtual machines to maximize resource usage and minimize waiting times. Different IoT application tasks can be difficult to schedule in a cloud-based computing architecture due to the heterogeneous features of IoT. With the rise in IoT sensors and the need to access information quickly and reliably, fog cloud computing is proposed for the integration of fog and cloud networks to meet these demands. One of the most important necessities in a fog cloud setting is efficient task scheduling, as this can help to lessen the time it t...

Grid architecture is one of the cornerstones for successful development and proliferation of Grid computing. The scale, dynamism and openness of the Grid, together with demands on its reliability, security and manageability, pose unique challenges on software architecture. The main objective of the Architectural Issues Institute of the CoreGRID NoE is to perform a significant improvement of architectural designs of future Grids by focusing on three particular key aspects: scalability of resources, adaptability, ...

This paper introduces a small world overlay Peerto-peer (P2P) transfer system with role based and reputation based access control policies, through which we are able to solve several serious problems existed in traditional P2P systems, like resource piracy, user privacy and network jam. The role based access control policy is implemented by the certificate based cryptography, e.g. X509. The reputation based access control policy consists of artificial scoring and automatic scoring components, corresponding to the quality and quantity evaluation of the transfer resources respectively. This system, upon the two policies and the adaptive small world overlay P2P topology, can restrict the peer's role and select a more credible peer to upload and download without any loss of performance, for the reason of the dramatic topology. Indeed it provides a secure, controllable and efficient resource transfer community.

Grid computing technology improves the computing experiences at organizations by effectively integrating distributed computing resources. However, just a small fraction of currently available Grid infrastructures focuses on reutilization of existing commodity computing resources. This paper introduces InteGrade, a novel object-oriented middleware Grid infrastructure that focuses on leveraging the idle computing power of shared desktop machines. Its features include support for a broad range of parallel applications and mechanisms to assure that the owners of shared resources do not perceive any loss in the quality of service. A prototype implementation is under construction and the current version is available for download.

With ever-new technologies emerging also the amount of information to be stored and processed is growing exponentially and is believed to be always at the limit. In contrast, however, huge resources are available in the IT sector alike e.g. the renewable energy sector, which are often even not at all used. This under-usage bares any rational especially in the IT sector where e.g. virtualisation and grid approaches could be fast implemented due to the great technical and fast turnover opportunities. Here, we describe this obvious paradox for the first time as the Inverse Tragedy of the Commons, in contrast to the Classical Tragedy of the Commons where resources are overexploited. From this perspective the grid IT sector attempting to share resources for better efficiency, reveals two challenges leading to the heart of the paradox: i) From a macro perspective all grid infrastructures involve not only mere technical solutions but also dominantly all of the autopoietic social sub-systems ranging from religion to policy. ii) On the micro level the individual players and their psychology and risk behaviour are of major importance for acting within the macro autopoietic framework. Thus, the challenges of grid implementation are similar to those of e.g. climate protection. This is well described by the classic Human Ecology triangle and our extension to a rectangle: invironment-individual-society-environment. Extension of this classical interdisciplinary field of basic and applied research to an e-Human Grid Ecology rational, allows the Inverse Tragedy of the Commons of the grid sector to be understood and approached better and implies obvious guidelines in the day-to-day management for grid and other (networked) resources, which is of importance for many fields with similar paradoxes as in (e-)society.

The amount of information is growing exponentially with ever-new technologies emerging and is believed to be always at the limit. In contrast, huge resources are obviously available, which are underused in the IT sector, similar as e.g. in the renewable energy sector. This is especially for grid with its fast turnover rates very astonishing considering the barriers for further development put forward by the inability to satisfy the need for such resources. The phenomenon is a typical example of the Inverse Tragedy of the Commons, i.e. resources are underexploited in contrast to the unsustainable and destructing overexploitation in the Classic Tragedy of the Commons. An analysis of IT and the grid sector which attempts to share resources for better usage efficiency, reveals two challenges, which lead to the heart of the paradox: i) From a macro perspective all grid infrastructures involve not only mere technical solutions but also dominantly all of the autopoietic social subsystems ranging from religion to policy. ii) On the micro level the individual players and their psychology and risk behaviour are of major importance for acting within the macro autopoietic framework. Consequently, the challenges of grid implementation are similar to those of other pressing global issues as e.g. climate protection. This is well described by extending the Human Ecology triangle to a rectangle: invironmentindividual-society-environment. By applying this extension of this classical field of interdisciplinary basic and applied research to the grid sector, i.e. by further extension to an e-Human Grid Ecology rational, the Grid Inverse Tragedy of the Commons can be understood and approached regarding the internalization challenge into e-Society and e-Life, from which then guidelines for the day-today management can be derived. This is of general importance for many complex fields and thus with similar paradoxes and challenges.

This study examines the relative efficacy of citizen science recruitment messages appealing to four motivations that were derived from previous research on motives for participation in citizen-science projects. We report on an experiment (N=36,513) that compared the response to email messages designed to appeal to these four motives for participation. We found that the messages appealing to the possibility of contributing to science and learning about science attracted more attention than did one about helping scientists but that one about helping scientists generated more initial contributions. Overall, the message about contributing to science resulted in the largest volume of contributions and joining a community, the lowest. The results should be informative to those managing citizen-science projects.

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Over the last decade, grid computing has paved the way for a new level of large‐scale‐distributed systems. However, this new step in distributed computing comes along with a completely new level of complexity. Grid management mechanisms play a key role, and a correct analysis and understanding of the grid behavior is needed. Traditional‐distributed computing management mechanisms analyze each resource separately and adjust specific parameters of each one of them. When trying to adapt the same procedures to grid computing, the vast complexity of the system can complicate this task. But grid complexity could only be a matter of perspective. It is possible to understand the grid behavior as a single system, instead of a set of resources. This abstraction could provide a deeper understanding of the system, describing large‐scale behavior and global events that probably would not be detected while analyzing each resource separately. In this paper a specific methodology is presented and d...

existed. Starting in the late 1950s, researchers have been performing progressively more sensitive searches, but each search has been limited by the technologies available at the time. As radio frequency technologies have become more efficient and computers have become faster, the searches have grown larger and more sensitive. The

The SEVENDIP optical pulse search looks for ns time scale pulses at visible wavelengths. It utilizes an automated 30 inch telescope, three ultra fast photo multiplier tubes and a coincidence detector. The target list includes F, G, K and M stars, globular cluster and galaxies. The ongoing SERENDIP V.v sky survey searches for radio signals at the 300 meter Arecibo Observatory. The currently installed configuration supports 128 million channels over a 200 MHz bandwidth with ∼1.6 Hz spectral resolution. Frequency stepping allows the spectrometer to cover the full 300MHz band of the Arecibo L-band receivers. The final configuration will allow data from all 14 receivers in the Arecibo L-band Focal Array to be monitored simultaneously with over 1.8 billion channels. SETI@home uses the desktop computers of volunteers to analyze over 160 TB of data at taken at Arecibo. Over 6 million volunteers have run SETI@home during its 10 year history. The SETI@home sky survey is 10 times more sensitive than SERENDIP V.v but it covers only a 2.5 MHz band, centered on 1420 MHz. SETI@home searches a much wider parameter space, including 14 octaves of signal bandwidth and 15 octaves of pulse period with Doppler drift corrections from-100 Hz/s to +100 Hz/s. SETI@home is being expanded to analyze data collected during observations of Kepler objects of interest in May 2011. The Astropulse project is the first SETI search for µs time scale pulses in the radio spectrum. Because short pulses are dispersed by the interstellar medium, and the amount of dispersion is unknown, Astropulse must search through 30,000 possible dispersions. Substantial computing power is required to conduct this search, so the project uses volunteers and their personal computers to carry out the computation (using distributed computing similar to SETI@home).

In this paper we investigate the general problem of controlling a scientific workflow service in terms of data management. We focus on the data management problem for the RedisDG scientific workflow engine. RedisDG is based on the Publish/Subscribe paradigm for the interaction between the different components of the system, hence new issues appear for scheduling. Indeed, the Publish/Subscribe paradigm utilization introduces different challenging problems, among them the design of effective solutions for managing data, on the fly, when tasks are published. Our contributions are twofold. First we add new functionalities to the RedisDG workflow engine with scheduling decisions related to the allocation of data intensive jobs to compute units and according to an efficient management of data and second we introduce a large set of experiments to validate our approaches. We analyze our results and we also sketch perspectives and insights. Experiments are conducted on the Grid'5000 testbed and the paper is a step forward to implement a 'Workflow engine as a Service' (WaaS).

In this paper we investigate the general problem of controlling a scientific workflow service in terms of data management. We focus on the data management problem for the RedisDG scientific workflow engine. RedisDG is based on the Publish/Subscribe paradigm for the interaction between the different components of the system, hence new issues appear for scheduling. Indeed, the Publish/Subscribe paradigm utilization introduces different challenging problems, among them the design of effective solutions for managing data, on the fly, when tasks are published. Our contributions are twofold. First we add new functionalities to the RedisDG workflow engine with scheduling decisions related to the allocation of data intensive jobs to compute units and according to an efficient management of data and second we introduce a large set of experiments to validate our approaches. We analyze our results and we also sketch perspectives and insights. Experiments are conducted on the Grid'5000 testbed and the paper is a step forward to implement a 'Workflow engine as a Service' (WaaS).

We conducted a quantitative analysis of ten citizen science projects hosted on the Zooniverse platform, using a data set of over 50 million activity records and more than 250, 000 users, collected between December 2010 and July 2013. We examined the level of participation of users in Zooniverse discussion forums in relation to their contributions toward the completion of scientific (micro-)tasks. As Zooniverse is home to a multitude of projects, we were also interested in the emergence of cross-projects effects, and identified those project characteristics, most importantly the subject domain and the duration of a project. We also looked into the adoption of expert terminology, showing that this phenomenon is dependent on the scientific domain which a project addresses but also affected by how the communication features are actually used by a community. This is the first study of this kind in this increasingly important class of online community, and its insights will inform the design and further development of the Zooniverse platform, and of citizen science systems as a whole.

This paper presents Bittella: a new social network for content distribution based on Peer-to-Peer technologies. It exploits the common interests of the users in order to create social groups based on an algorithm called Ranking Algorithm. On the other hand, Bittella is deployed over a semantic-search based and unstructured p2p network, in spite of this it uses Bittorrent-like download techniques in order to improve the download time. For this purpose, a new Bittorrent trackerless scheme is proposed.

This paper presents Bittella: a new social network for content distribution based on Peer-to-Peer technologies. It exploits the common interests of the users in order to create social groups based on an algorithm called Ranking Algorithm. On the other hand, Bittella is deployed over a semantic-search based and unstructured p2p network, in spite of this it uses Bittorrent-like download techniques in order to improve the download time. For this purpose, a new Bittorrent trackerless scheme is proposed.

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has received a great deal of attention in recent years from many researchers. Recently, vehicular edge computing has been a new paradigm to support computation-intensive and latency-sensitive services in IoV. Moreover, with the cellularvehicle to everything technology, many tasks and applications can be efficiently offloaded to another node for processing. In this paper a novel cluster-based virtual edge computation offloading scheme is proposed, which has as its main objective to efficiently find the most suitable multi-hop neighbor to act as a virtual edge computing (VEC) server for task offloading. The proposed scheme is initially based on the formation and maintenance of multi-hop clusters with high stability, whereas its efficiency is further enhanced by the local/distributed computations taking place where it's possible. CCS CONCEPTS • Networks → Algorithms; Network types; Ad hoc networks.

The SETI@home project has recently completed its third year of active data analysis. Over 4 million volunteers have joined the search, providing a combined total of over 1 million CPU-years of processing power. SETI@home performs a sensitive search for extraterrestrial signals in a 2.5 MHz band centered on 1420 MHz. SETI@home searches a wide parameter space including 14 octaves of signal bandwidth and 15 octaves of pulse period with Doppler drift corrections from −50 Hz/s to +50 Hz/s. We will briefly describe the SETI@home project and the algorithms used in the SETI@home client. We will describe the post-processing methods we use to reject RFI and select candidate signals from the nearly 4 billion “hits” returned by SETI@home clients.

The SEVENDIP optical pulse search looks for ns time scale pulses at visible wavelengths. It utilizes an automated 30 inch telescope, three ultra fast photo multiplier tubes and a coincidence detector. The target list includes F, G, K and M stars, globular cluster and galaxies. The ongoing SERENDIP V.v sky survey searches for radio signals at the 300 meter Arecibo Observatory. The currently installed configuration supports 128 million channels over a 200 MHz bandwidth with ∼1.6 Hz spectral resolution. Frequency stepping allows the spectrometer to cover the full 300MHz band of the Arecibo L-band receivers. The final configuration will allow data from all 14 receivers in the Arecibo L-band Focal Array to be monitored simultaneously with over 1.8 billion channels. SETI@home uses the desktop computers of volunteers to analyze over 160 TB of data at taken at Arecibo. Over 6 million volunteers have run SETI@home during its 10 year history. The SETI@home sky survey is 10 times more sensitive than SERENDIP V.v but it covers only a 2.5 MHz band, centered on 1420 MHz. SETI@home searches a much wider parameter space, including 14 octaves of signal bandwidth and 15 octaves of pulse period with Doppler drift corrections from-100 Hz/s to +100 Hz/s. SETI@home is being expanded to analyze data collected during observations of Kepler objects of interest in May 2011. The Astropulse project is the first SETI search for µs time scale pulses in the radio spectrum. Because short pulses are dispersed by the interstellar medium, and the amount of dispersion is unknown, Astropulse must search through 30,000 possible dispersions. Substantial computing power is required to conduct this search, so the project uses volunteers and their personal computers to carry out the computation (using distributed computing similar to SETI@home).

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Desktop Grids are computing infrastructures that aggregate a set of desktop-class machines in which all the participating entities have the same roles, responsibilities, and rights. In this paper, we present ShareGrid, a P2P Desktop Grid infrastructure based on the OurGrid middleware, that federates the resources provided by a set of small research laboratories to easily share and use their computing resources. We discuss the techniques and tools we employed to ensure scalability, efficiency, and usability, and describe the various applications used on it. We also demonstrate the ability of ShareGrid of providing good performance and scalability by reporting the results of experimental evaluations carried out by running various applications with different resource requirements. Our experience with ShareGrid indicates that P2P Desktop Grids can represent an effective answer to the computing needs of small research laboratories, as long as they provide both This work has been partially supported by TOP-IX and the Piemonte Region Agency under the Innovation Development Program.

Existing solutions to the problem of finding valuable information on the Web suffers from several limitations like simplified query languages, out-of-date in-formation or arbitrary results sorting. In this paper a different approach to this problem is described. It is based on the idea of distributed processing of Web pages content. To provide sufficient performance, the idea of browser-based volunteer computing is utilized, which requires the implementation of text pro-cessing algorithms in JavaScript. In this paper the architecture of Web pages content analysis system is presented, details concerning the implementation of the system and the text processing algorithms are described and test results are provided.

Grid architecture is one of the cornerstones for successful development and proliferation of Grid computing. The scale, dynamism and openness of the Grid, together with demands on its reliability, security and manageability, pose unique challenges on software architecture. The main objective of the Architectural Issues Institute of the CoreGRID NoE is to perform a significant improvement of architectural designs of future Grids by focusing on three particular key aspects: scalability of resources, adaptability, ...

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is evolving to efficiently and collaboratively utilize the ever-increasing pool of computing resources available on mobile devices. In such high dynamic networks, nodes are susceptible to failure for many reasons, for example, being out of battery or hijacked. Managing reliability of dynamic mobile resources provides a strong motivation for proactive autonomic management capabilities in the MCC. To this end, we propose a reliable collaborative mobilecloud management system (MobiCloud), which automatically manages task scheduling and reliable resource allocation. MobiCloud utilizes our new opt-in, prediction and trust management services to realize reliable cloud formation and maintenance in a dynamic mobile environment. In this paper, we present MobiCloud architecture and its associated Proactive Adaptive List-based Scheduling and Allocation AlgorithM (P-ALSALAM) for MCC. This algorithm dynamically maps applications' requirements to the currently or potentially reliable mobile resources. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed system not only significantly improves performance, but also substantially enhances the stability of mobileclouds.

The LHC@Home BOINC project has provided computing capacity for numerical simulations to researchers at CERN since 2004, and has since 2011 been expanded with a wider range of applications. The traditional CERN accelerator physics simulation code SixTrack enjoys continuing volunteers support, and thanks to virtualisation a number of applications from the LHC experiment collaborations and particle theory groups have joined the consolidated LHC@Home BOINC project. This paper addresses the challenges related to traditional and virtualized applications in the BOINC environment, and how volunteer computing has been integrated into the overall computing strategy of the laboratory through the consolidated LHC@Home service. Thanks to the computing power provided by volunteers joining LHC@Home, numerous accelerator beam physics studies have been carried out, yielding an improved understanding of charged particle dynamics in the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and its future upgrades. The mai...

This study examines the relative efficacy of citizen science recruitment messages appealing to four motivations that were derived from previous research on motives for participation in citizen-science projects. We report on an experiment (N=36,513) that compared the response to email messages designed to appeal to these four motives for participation. We found that the messages appealing to the possibility of contributing to science and learning about science attracted more attention than did one about helping scientists but that one about helping scientists generated more initial contributions. Overall, the message about contributing to science resulted in the largest volume of contributions and joining a community, the lowest. The results should be informative to those managing citizen-science projects.

This paper primarily talks about the art and use of distributed computing specifically in the aspect of volunteer computing and how it can help the African Scientist in the fight against diseases and disasters where high computational simulations are required. A typical case of this is the Africa@Home Project where high demanding computational complexity based research has been implemented using this technology.

Today's computing development is being characterized by the rapid development of high speed networks and the increase in computing power. Computing is not any more limited to the supercomputers, PCs and laptops but also smart phones and tablets which are available for billions of users offering high computing performances at low cost and interconnected via Internet. This continuing technological development is leading the increase importance of the distributed computing paradigms and the apparition of new ones. This paper aims to review the most important distributed computing paradigms and the principal similarities and differences between them. This survey is a kind of a brief road map that would be useful for researchers, students, and commercial users.

II. HISTORY OF VOLUNTEER COMPUTING The term volunteer computing was coined by Luis FG Sarmenta, the developer of Bayanihan. The first volun-teer computing project on the internet was GIMPS [5],the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search), which started in January ...

The success of grid computing in open environments like the Internet is highly dependent on the adoption of mechanisms to detect failures and malicious sabotage attempts. It is also required to maintain a trust management system that permits one to distinguish the trustable from the non-trustable participants in a global computation. Without these mechanisms, users with data-critical applications will never rely on desktop grids, and will rather prefer to support higher costs to run their computations in closed and secure computing systems. This paper discusses the topics of sabotage-tolerance and trust management. After reviewing the state-of-the-art, we present two novel techniques: a mechanism for sabotage detection and a protocol for distributed trust management. The proposed techniques are targeted at the paradigm of volunteer-based computing commonly used on desktop grids.

Many types of distributed scientific and commercial applications require the submission of a large number of independent jobs. One highly successful and low cost mechanism for acquiring the necessary compute power is the "publicresource computing" paradigm, which exploits the computational power of private computers. Recently decentralized peer-to-peer and super-peer technologies have been proposed for adaptation in these systems. A super-peer protocol, proposed earlier by this group, is used for the execution of jobs based upon the volunteer requests of workers, and a super-peer overlay is used to perform two kinds of matching operations: the assignment of jobs to workers and providing workers the input data needed for job execution. This paper extends this superpeer protocol to account for a more dynamic and general scenario, in which: (i) workers can leave the network at any time; (ii) each job is executed multiple times, either to obtain better statistical accuracy or to perform parameter sweep analysis; and, (iii) input data is replicated and distributed to multiple data caches on-the-fly, in an effort to improve performance in terms of data availability, fault tolerance and execution time. A simulation study was performed to analyze the latest iteration of the super-peer protocol and specifically evaluate the new features.

Grid architecture is one of the cornerstones for successful development and proliferation of Grid computing. The scale, dynamism and openness of the Grid, together with demands on its reliability, security and manageability, pose unique challenges on software architecture. The main objective of the Architectural Issues Institute of the CoreGRID NoE is to perform a significant improvement of architectural designs of future Grids by focusing on three particular key aspects: scalability of resources, adaptability, ...

Several kinds of scientific and commercial applications require the execution of a large number of independent tasks. One highly successful and low cost mechanism for acquiring the necessary compute power for these applications is the ���public-resource computing���, or ���desktop Grid��� paradigm, which exploits the computational power of private computers. So far, this paradigm has not been applied to data mining applications for two main reasons. First, it is not trivial to decompose a data mining algorithm into truly ...

The SETI@home project has recently completed its third year of active data analysis. Over 4 million volunteers have joined the search, providing a combined total of over 1 million CPU-years of processing power. SETI@home performs a sensitive search for extraterrestrial signals in a 2.5 MHz band centered on 1420 MHz. SETI@home searches a wide parameter space including 14 octaves of signal bandwidth and 15 octaves of pulse period with Doppler drift corrections from −50 Hz/s to +50 Hz/s. We will briefly describe the SETI@home project and the algorithms used in the SETI@home client. We will describe the post-processing methods we use to reject RFI and select candidate signals from the nearly 4 billion “hits” returned by SETI@home clients.

The amount of information is growing exponentially with ever-new technologies emerging and is believed to be always at the limit. In contrast, huge resources are obviously available, which are underused in the IT sector, similar as e.g. in the renewable energy sector. This is especially for grid with its fast turnover rates very astonishing considering the barriers for further development put forward by the inability to satisfy the need for such resources. The phenomenon is a typical example of the Inverse Tragedy of the Commons, i.e. resources are underexploited in contrast to the unsustainable and destructing overexploitation in the Classic Tragedy of the Commons. An analysis of IT and the grid sector which attempts to share resources for better usage efficiency, reveals two challenges, which lead to the heart of the paradox: i) From a macro perspective all grid infrastructures involve not only mere technical solutions but also dominantly all of the autopoietic social subsystems ranging from religion to policy. ii) On the micro level the individual players and their psychology and risk behaviour are of major importance for acting within the macro autopoietic framework. Consequently, the challenges of grid implementation are similar to those of other pressing global issues as e.g. climate protection. This is well described by extending the Human Ecology triangle to a rectangle: invironmentindividual-society-environment. By applying this extension of this classical field of interdisciplinary basic and applied research to the grid sector, i.e. by further extension to an e-Human Grid Ecology rational, the Grid Inverse Tragedy of the Commons can be understood and approached regarding the internalization challenge into e-Society and e-Life, from which then guidelines for the day-today management can be derived. This is of general importance for many complex fields and thus with similar paradoxes and challenges.

This is alway a big step when it comes the time a student is on the finishing line of his studies and has to choose what will he do in the next months. This can likely be the end of the academic world and the transition for the profissional one. Many things have to be taken in account, starting with the choice of making a disertation or a graduation project in a real company, and ending with the selection of the thesis subject or the project to be done. In this case, I feel lucky I hadn't much doubts about what I would like to do. My erasmus experience and passion for physics guided me to a great internatinal company: CERN. Luckily enough, the project proposal really fitted my profile as using informatics, by means of a cluster, to increase performance of a physics system. And that's what really fascinates me in this world of technologies: to push limits further to support human progress.

Cycle sharing over the Internet has increased in popularity during the last decade, with increasingly powerful machines being made available to existing projects. In this paper, we present GiGi-MR, a framework that allows non-expert users to run CPU-intensive jobs on top of volunteer resources over the Internet. GiGi-MR has several distinctive features: it allows non-expert users to easily partition their jobs in several parallel tasks; such Bag-of-Tasks (BoT) are executed in parallel as a set of MapReduce applications; the volunteer resources that provide the best match for the tasks being executed are chosen (using attenuated bloom filters); it provides a portable checkpointing fault-tolerance mechanism based on virtualization; it does not rely exclusively on a central server (or servers) at all times (thus minimizing the bottleneck effect); it deals with malicious participants (possibly byzantine) using an efficient partial replication mechanism to validate the results obtained; ...

Grid computing provides integration of different environments, creating a unified system, where organizations can share, manage and access different resources regardless of where they are located. However, the lack of integration among different grid computing systems hinders total exploitation of resources. This work investigates and develops an interface for the integration of two heterogeneous grid computing environments: Globus and InteGrade. Such integration transparently increases computational power. Users will be able to submit jobs through both grid environments and applications will be executed in either Globus or InteGrade grids, or even in both.

Grid computing is often regarded as a means for creating inexpensive "super-computing." With grid computing organizations can optimize computing and data resources, pool such resources to support massive, compute intensive loads. This paper aims at demonstrating experiences gained during aggregation of large computational power acquired from idle workstations connected on the campus. The cycle harvesting is attained by integrating and configuring a suite of grid and middleware software technologies anchored by the Globus toolkit, further optimized to extract the large computational capacity in the form of MIPS and GFLOPS. NirmaGrid produced is coordination of available computational efforts by Scavenging of idle CPU cycles, which allows the sharing of a computational task among multiple processors.