Implementation and evaluation of a distributed and cooperative load-balancing mechanism for dependable volunteer computing

This paper proposes a P2P-based dynamic load balancing mechanism to increase the dependability of volunteer computing. The proposed mechanism is incorporated into a volunteer computing middleware, called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). The proposed mechanism provides two additional features: decentralized load balancing and proxy download. The former feature reduces the variation of the execution times for individual tasks, which are usually aggravated by dynamic and unpredictable load changes on volunteer computing resources. The latter offers another way to assign tasks to idle computing resources when the BOINC project server fails in the task assignment. Using a prototype implementation, this paper examines the effect of the proposed mechanism on the performance of a real volunteer computing system. The experimental results show that the proposed mechanism can reduce the maximum turnaround time by 42% and further improve the total throughput of the volunteer computing system by 27%.