Scalable Computing and Communications: Theory and Practice

18

–––––––––––––––––––––––

GFOG: Green and Flexible Opportunistic Grids

Harold Castro, Mario Villamizar, German Sotelo, Cesar O. Diaz, Johnatan Pecero, Pascal Bouvry, and Samee U. Khan

18.1  INTRODUCTION

Large-scale computing platforms and current networking technologies enable sharing, selection, and aggregation of highly heterogeneous resources for solving complex real problems. Opportunistic grids are distributed platforms built out of the available resources (volunteers or donors) of an existing hardware platform that harvest the computing power of nondedicated resources when they are idle. Internet opportunistic grids are designed to take advantage of the capabilities of thousands or millions of desktop computers distributed through the Internet. On the other hand, institutional opportunistic grids involve the use of hundreds or thousands of computers available in a single organization or institution. In both opportunistic grid types, on the volunteer or donor desktops, an agent is executed to control, manage, and monitor the execution of grid tasks. Two main approaches are used to execute the agent:

• A desktop client runs an executable program to provide access to a set of resources of the desktop in a limited manner.
• A client executes a virtual machine, which is used to isolate and limit the execution environment required to execute the grid tasks.

In this last approach, isolation of both environments is critical; therefore, the use of virtualization is a promising ...