Approach of a UML profile for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for network computing (BOINC)

Despite the current enormous hype and popularity of Grid Computing environments like Amazons EC2 or Microsoft´s Windows Azure, there exist open-source and free of cost software frameworks which allow to create high performance computing installation by means of Public Resource Computing (PRC). One PRC framework is BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) for solving large scale and complex computational problems. Each computer works on its own workunits independently from each other and sends back its result to a project server. 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. In this paper we present a Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile for BOINC called Visu@lGrid profile (VGP). A BOINC project installation for one or more hosts, a role-based access control, and modeling of scientific application is feasible by use of VGP. Based on our approach we provide a specification that allows the creation of BOINC projects with less development and implementation effort.