nuBOINC: BOINC Extensions for Community Cycle Sharing

Abstract

Currently, cycle sharing over the Internet is a one-way deal. Computer owners only have one role in the process: to donate their computers' idle time. This is due to the fact that it is difficult for an ordinary user to install the required infrastructure, develop the processing applications and gather enough computer cycle donors.In this paper we describe a set of BOINC extensions that allow any user to create and submit jobs that can take advantage of remote idle cycles. These jobs are processed by commonly available software (e.g. programming language interpreters or virtual machines, statistical software) that is installed in the remote donating computers.In order to submit their jobs, users only have to provide the input files, select the processing application and define the command line to provide to that application. Later, users of the same software packages will contact the server, receive a set of jobs, and process them using the already installed commodity application. These users can later take advantage of other people’s computer cycles.This system allows an expressive definition of jobs providing considerable speed gains, while leveraging a cyclesharing platform and widely available commodity applications, in a truly global communal computer cycle market.