Centralized cloud infrastructures have become the de-facto platform for data-intensive computing today. However, they suffer from inefficient data mobility due to the centralization of cloud resources, and hence, are highly unsuited for disperseddata-intensive applications, where the data may be spread at multiple geographical locations. In this paper, we present Nebula: a dispersed cloud infrastructure that uses voluntary edge resources for both computation and data storage. We describe the lightweight Nebula architecture that enables distributed dataintensive computing through a number of optimizations including location-aware data and computation placement, replication, and recovery. We evaluate Nebula's performance on an emulated volunteer platform that spans over 50 PlanetLab nodes distributed across Europe, and show how a common data-intensive computing framework, MapReduce, can be easily deployed and run on Nebula. We show Nebula MapReduce is robust to a wide array of failures and substantially outperforms other wide-area versions based on a BOINC like model.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.