V-BOINC: The Virtualization of BOINC

Abstract

Abstract-The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open source client-server middleware system created to allow projects with large computational requirements, usually set in the scientific domain, to utilize a technically unlimited number of volunteer machines distributed over large physical distances. However various problems exist deploying applications over these heterogeneous machines using BOINC: applications must be ported to each machine architecture type, the project server must be trusted to supply authentic applications, applications that do not regularly checkpoint may lose execution progress upon volunteer machine termination and applications that have dependencies may find it difficult to run under BOINC.To solve such problems we introduce virtual BOINC, or V-BOINC, where virtual machines are used to run computations on volunteer machines. Application developers can then compile their applications on a single architecture, checkpointing issues are solved through virtualization API's and many security concerns are addressed via the virtual machine's sandbox environment. In this paper we focus on outlining a unique approach on how virtualization can be introduced into BOINC and demonstrate that V-BOINC offers acceptable computational performance when compared to regular BOINC. Finally we show that applications with dependencies can easily run under V-BOINC in turn increasing the computational potential volunteer computing offers to the general public and project developers.

Big Data Mining Using Public Distributed Computing

“…QoS improvement methods have been researched in [39]. The proposed solution takes advantage of virtual machines by using V-BOINC [38]. This approach not only solves the task continuity problem, but also solves dependency issues that we will discuss further in Section 4.4.…”

“…for regular BOINC applications is not possible or is hardly solvable [37]. Virtualization is used for hiding physical resources of system from the operating system and many issues can be solved using it [38]. Virtualization is defined as a technology that introduces a software abstraction layer between the hardware and the operating system and applications running on top of it [7,45].…”

“…In addition to this, another project called V-BOINC was introduced by [38]. V-BOINC also uses virtualization to run applications on volunteer computers and sends small virtual machine images to volunteers.…”

“…This in turn enabled developers to use dependencies under V-BOINC and increased variety of applications volunteer infrastructure can run. More science and business projects could be carried out this way, since applications become available to wider public [38]. Furthermore, V-BOINC solved additional problems like: _ application trust;…”

Ad Hoc Cloud Computing

“…As the ad hoc cloud computing paradigm also involves harvesting resources from unreliable hosts, BOINC is well suited to our purposes. However, in order to protect cloud jobs running upon unreliable and perhaps unsecure hosts, as well as the need to protect the processes running on the hosts themselves, we have created a virtualized version of BOINC, named V-BOINC [5]. V-BOINC takes advantage of virtualization to run BOINC computations within virtual machines as opposed to directly on volunteer machines.…”