The ShareGrid Peer-to-Peer Desktop Grid: Infrastructure, Applications, and Performance Evaluation

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Desktop Grids are computing infrastructures that aggregate a set of desktop-class machines in which all the participating entities have the same roles, responsibilities, and rights. In this paper, we present ShareGrid, a P2P Desktop Grid infrastructure based on the OurGrid middleware, that federates the resources provided by a set of small research laboratories to easily share and use their computing resources. We discuss the techniques and tools we employed to ensure scalability, efficiency, and usability, and describe the various applications used on it. We also demonstrate the ability of ShareGrid of providing good performance and scalability by reporting the results of experimental evaluations carried out by running various applications with different resource requirements. Our experience with ShareGrid indicates that P2P Desktop Grids can represent an effective answer to the computing needs of small research laboratories, as long as they provide both ease of management and use, and good scalability and performance.

Prometheus: A flexible toolkit for the experimentation with virtualized infrastructures

“…Unfortunately, however, physical testbeds are characterized by a limited controllability of the experimental conditions that limits the reproducibility of results, since real applications, systems, and workloads cannot be completely controlled by the experimenter. Furthermore, they are also considerably hard to implement,() since typically the entire system must be implemented, albeit at a smaller scale than a system that would go in production use. To make physical testbeds a real experimentation option, it is thus necessary to properly address these problems that, at the best of our knowledge, have no solution in the current literature.…”

FCMS: A fuzzy controller for CPU and memory consolidation under SLA constraints

“…To increase their profit, CPs typically resort to server consolidation , which consists in allocating several VMs on each physical server, in the attempt to use as little servers as possible to run the VMs of their customers. Server consolidation allows a CP to reduce the number of physical resources that must be turned‐on to run the VMs of its customers and, at the same time, to raise their utilization, so as to reduce both their electricity and amortized costs . The maximization of the consolidation level that is achieved by allocating on each physical server as many VMs as possible has thus become 1 of the major goals of CPs.…”

“…Server consolidation allows a CP to reduce the number of physical resources that must be turned-on to run the VMs of its customers and, at the same time, to raise their utilization, so as to reduce both their electricity and amortized costs. [7][8][9][10] The maximization of the consolidation level that is achieved by allocating on each physical server as many VMs as possible has thus become 1 of the major goals of CPs.…”

Using a Simple Prioritisation Mechanism to Effectively Interoperate Service and Opportunistic Grids in the EELA-2 e-Infrastructure

“…3 Service Grids normally assemble high performance, dedicated computing resources, such as clusters, supercomputers, and large data storage systems that are spread over a relatively small number of administrative domains. For instance, the largest service Grid currently in operation is the one created in the context of the EGEE series of projects 4 [14] which, at the time of writing, encompassed more than 160,000 processing cores distributed among approximately 270 resource centres in more than 60 countries. 5 Service Grids provide high and well defined levels of quality of 1 http://www.eu-eela.org/first-phase.php.…”

“…Several types of opportunistic Grids have been proposed, implemented and deployed. Among the most important representatives of this class of Grids one can list: desktop Grids, first proposed by the Condor project [9,18]; voluntary computing platforms such as the pioneer SETI@home system [1] and its successor BOINC [2] and, more recently, peer-to-peer (P2P) Grids such as those supported by the OurGrid middleware [4,6]. In all cases, the functioning of an opportunistic Grid is very similar and simple.…”