A modeling language approach for the abstraction of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) framework

BOINC (Berkley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is a framework for solving large scale and complex computational problems by means of public resource computing. Here, the computational effort is distributed onto a large number of computers connected by the Internet. Each computer works on its own workunits independently from each other and sends back its result to a project server. There are quite a few BOINC-based projects in the world. Installing, configuring, and maintaining a BOINC based project however is a highly sophisticated task. Scientists and developers need a lot of experience regarding the underlying communication and operating system technologies, even if only a handful of BOINC related functions are actually needed for most applications. This limits the application of BOINC in scientific computing although there is an ever growing need for computational power in this field. In this paper we present a new approach for model-based development of BOINC projects based on the specification of a high level abstraction language as well as a suitable development environment. This approach borrows standardized modeling concepts from the wellknown Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Object Constraint Language (OCL).