Volunteer Clouds: From Volunteer Computing to Interconnected Infrastructures

Interconnecting Volunteer Computing

The term federation is used as a specific method for interconnecting distributed computing systems. For a generic interconnection the Inter-* phrase can be used. For example for the generic interconnection of clouds the term Inter-Cloud was created and formulated by the Global Inter-Cloud Technology Forum (Global Inter-cloud Technology Forum, 2010). This definition can be adapted for the notion of interconnected volunteer computing systems:

• Definition 1: Inter-Volunteer Computing is a volunteer computing model that, for purpose of guaranteeing service quality (e.g., performance), allows on-demand transfer of workload through the collaboration of volunteer computing systems based on the coordination of each users requirements for service quality and the use of standard interfaces.

Based on this definition Figure 1 shows the different possible interconnected architectures for volunteer computing adapted from cloud construct architectures defined in (Grozev & Buyya, 2012) separated into two groups: In multi-constructs the different volunteer computing systems are accessed in a centralized manner which can be either a multi-access service (see a. in Figure 1) where users can access multiple VCSs through a single service or a meta-middleware library (see b. in Figure 1) that users can use to develop their own brokers to access multiple infrastructures. In contrast federations allow the infrastructures to collaborate with each other. This can be achieved either by using a central component (see c. in Figure 1) to facilitate workload distribution or by directly in generally using some peer-to-peer manner (see d. in Figure 1). While multi-constructs can be established by third parties using APIs or tools provided by the different VCSs, federations are mainly volunteer formations that require the agreement between the two or more parties. Basically a federation is established when a set of providers interconnect their infrastructures to share resources among each other (Rochwerger et al., 2009):