Parallel Scientific Computing on Public Computing Platforms

Project Details

• Project start: 2010
• Funded by: BaCaTeC

Project Participants

• Project Manager: Prof. Dr. Thomas Rauber
• Project Staff: Dr. Marvin Ferber
• External Partners: Dr. Yi Pan Georgia State University, Department of Computer Science, Atlanta, GA 30302-4110, USA

Project Description

Public computing is a type of grid computing architectures composed of autonomous volunteer workstations coordinated by a central server complex over the Internet. Exploiting these distributed resources comes at the price of unpredictable availability, fluctuating performance, and heterogeneous participant nodes. Central to addressing these problems is an efficient and accurate scheduling mechanism for the public computing architecture. In this research, we will study grid computing in general and a public computing platform called BOINC in particular. Several major issues and challenges in grid computing research will be identified. We will also introduce new scheduling schemes based on intelligent algorithms such as the ant colony algorithm. We plan to design a new peer-to-peer architecture for solving the bottleneck problem in the client-server architecture used in the BOINC system. The new architecture will be a completely distributed system and new scheduling schemes will be designed and studied.