Centralized BOINC resources manager for institutional networks

This paper describes a new BOINC based approach to manage desktop grid environments belonging to institutions such as Universities or Companies. While the BOINC model delegates to users the decision of selecting the projects to which their own resources will collaborate with, we consider here the case of institutions which owns the computers provided to their staff. Our model removes users from the projects selection step and transfers this responsibility to computers´ owner: the institution itself. Our solution describes a new model for handling BOINC enabled computers in a centralized way, while also provides a new software management tool. This tool allows an institution to remotely manage all its BOINC enabled resources from a centralized point of view. We have set up and tested the model in a modern University, with distributed computer labs on three different cities. We show how the resources were remotely assigned to different projects selected by the institution. Finally, we describe results supporting the effectiveness of the approach.