Models and scheduling mechanisms for global computing applications

Projects like SETI@home have demonstrated the tremendous capabilities of Internet-connected commodity resources. The rapid improvement of commodity components makes the global computing platform increasingly viable for other large-scale data and compute-intensive applications. In this paper, we study how global computing can accommodate new types of applications. We describe a global computing model that captures resource characteristics and instantiate this model with data from several surveys and studies. We propose performance metrics for global computing applications and evaluate two scheduling mechanisms in simulation. We then draw conclusions concerning the development and enhancement of global computing systems.