XtremLab: A System for Characterizing Internet Desktop Grids

Desktop grid (DG) systems use the idle computing power of many volunteered desktop PC’s on the Internet to support large-scale computation and storage. For over a decade, DG systems have been the largest and the most powerful distributed computing systems, offering a plethora of computing power at a fraction of the cost of supercomputers. The volunteer desktops participating in DG projects are volatile and heterogeneous, but there is little detailed information about their volatility and heterogeneity. Yet this characterization is essential for the simulation and modelling of such systems. We are conducting a project whose goal is to obtain a detailed picture of the DG landscape. To this end, we are deploying resource sensors on the volunteer desktops to measure the availability of CPU, disk space, memory, and network bandwidth. An initial version of the project has been deployed (see http://xtremlab.lri.fr), and currently has about 1,800 participating hosts. The resulting resource ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Paul Malecot, Derrick Kondo, Gilles Fedak
• Keywords: Computing Power, DG Systems, Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPDC 2006, Idle Computing Power