Availability Traces of Enterprise Desktop Grids

Desktop grids use the idle cycles of mostly desktop PC´s to support large-scale computation and data storage. Today, these types of computing platforms are the largest distributed computing systems in the world. The most popular project, SETI@home, uses over 20 TeraFlop/sec provided by hundreds of thousands of desktops. Numerous other projects, which span a wide range of scientific domains, also use the cumulative computing power offered by desktop grids, and there have also been commercial endeavors for harnessing the computing power within an enterprise, i.e., an organization´s local area network. Despite the popularity and success of many desktop grid projects, the volatility of the hosts within desktop grids has been poorly understood. Yet, this characterization is essential for accurate simulation and modelling of such platforms. In an effort to support such activities, we gathered availability traces from four real enterprise desktop grids