Towards a volunteer cloud system

The paper completes the work started in the EU FP7 EDGI project for extending service grids with volunteer (global) and institutional (local) desktop grids. The Generic BOINC Application Client (GBAC) concept described in the paper enables the transparent and automatic forwarding of parameter sweep application (parametric) jobs from service grid VOs (Virtual Organizations) into connected desktop grids without any porting effort. GBAC that introduces virtualization for the volunteer BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) clients can also be considered as a first step towards establishing volunteer cloud systems since it provides solutions for several problems of creating such a volunteer cloud system.

The EDGI project integrates Desktop Grid to Service Grid and virtualization on resources. ► GBAC (Generic BOINC Application Client) provides virtualization on BOINC clients. ► Volunteer DesktopGrids using GBAC is the basis for a volunteer-based AaaS cloud. ► GBAC saves manpower of application porting and provides a safe environment for the jobs. ► GBAC does not lean on BOINC server-side support, so it works with any job schedulers.