A Volunteer-Computing-Based Grid Environment for Connect6 Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a volunteer-computing-based grid environment or called a desktop grid environment for Connect6 applications. The Connect6 application described in this paper is to let professional Connect6 players to develop or solve openings, based on two programs, NCTU6 and Verifier. NCTU6 is to make Connect6 moves, written by the team led by Wu [19][21]. NCTU6 Verifier (abbr. Verifier), modified from NCTU6, is to verify whether one player wins in a given game position, or to generate the defensive moves if not winning in the position. Since both NCTU6 and Verifier consume huge amount of computation resources and requires ondemand responses, we design a desktop grid environment that provides players with on-demand computing through dynamic resource provisioning. The underlying desktop grid achieves high throughput computing by harvesting the idle CPU times on desktop computers connected to the Internet.

Job-Level Proof Number Search

“…Ask-info messages can be used to ask the job-level system to report the job status for monitoring. The details [30] are omitted in this paper.…”

“…The job-level computation model was realized in a desktop system designed by Wu et al [30]. In practice, a job-level system may also support some other messages, such as abortion messages, ask-info messages, etc.…”

“…In fact, our JL-PNS client is embedded into a game record editor environment. An extra benefit of this is to allow users or experts to look into the search tree during the running time, and to help choose the best move to search in the case that the program does not find the best move to win (see [30] and [35]). …”

“…Using JL-PNS with the job, NCTU6, on desktop grids (a kind of volunteer computing system 1 [4], [9], [24], [30]), we solved several Connect6 positions including several difficult three-move openings, as shown in Fig. 12.…”

Towards Real-Time, Volunteer Distributed Computing

“…Recently, Wu et al presented a volunteer computing-based grid environment for Connect6 application [9], where the game "Connect6" has very high complexity similar to Chess and the game of Go. They suggested an on-demand computing by using a "push" model on communication between the main server and hosts, because a "pull" model-based systems (such as BOINC) should wait for requests from the hosts to distribute jobs.…”