A peer-to-peer architecture for data-intensive cycle sharing

It has been nearly a decade since volunteer computing was first popularized by the highly successful [email protected] project. [email protected]'s core software evolved and became the Berkeley Infrastructure for Open Network Computing (BOINC). This development paved the way for many other scientific projects to leverage the power of volunteer computing and Desktop Grids. More recently, there has been a movement to transition many of the applications that run at large-scale computing facilities to Desktop Grid platforms. One of the challenges that arises when moving jobs from Service Grids to Desktop Grids is managing data distribution to the numerous and highly distributed worker nodes. In this paper we present a data sharing architecture that enhances file sharing within Desktop Grids while also easing Service to Desktop Grid migration. The architecture presented here takes into consideration many of the specific needs of scientific volunteer computing applications, such as control of security aspects, legacy application integration, and mechanisms for participants to opt-in and opt-out of the system.