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.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Foster, I., Kesselman, C. (eds.): The Grid: Blueprint for a Future Computing Infrastructure. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1999)
The DataGrid Project: High Energy Physics Data Grid Initiative. http://eu-datagrid.web.cern.ch/eu-datagrid/. Visited on Dec. 18 2009
The Grid Physics Networks (GriPhyN) project. http://www.griphyn.org. Visited on Dec. 18 2009
The Grid5000 Project. http://www.grid5000.fr. Visited on Dec. 18 2009
The NEESgrid Project. http://www.neesgrid.org. Visited on Oct. 18 2009
Choi, S., Kim, H., Byun, E., Baik, M., Kim, S., Park, C., Hwang, C.: Characterizing and classifying Desktop Grid. In: Proc. of the 7th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID’07), pp. 743–748. IEEE Computer Society, Washington (2007)
Kondo, D., Chien, A.A., Casanova, H.: Resource management for rapid application turnaround on enterprise Desktop Grids. In: Proc. of the 2004 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (SC’04), Pittsburgh, PA, USA, p. 17 (2004)
Anderson, D.P., Cobb, J., Korpela, E., Lebofsky, M., Werthimer, D.: SETI@home: an experiment in public-resource computing. Commun. ACM 45(11), 56–61 (2002)
The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. http://www.mersenne.org. Visited on Dec. 18 2009
The FightAids@Home Project. http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu. Visited on Dec. 18 2009
The GRID.ORG Project. http://www.grid.org. Visited on Dec. 18 2009
Anderson, D.P., Fedak, G.: The computational and storage potential of volunteer computing. In: Proc. of the 6th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID’06), Singapore, pp. 73–80 (2006)
Andrade, N., Cirne, W., Brasileiro, F., Roisenberg, P.: OurGrid: an approach to easily assemble Grids with equitable resource sharing. In: Proc. of the 9th Workshop on Job Scheduling Strategies for Parallel Processing (JSSPP’03), Seattle, WA, USA, pp. 61–86 (2003)
Cirne, W., Brasileiro, F., Andrade, N., Costa, L., Andrade, A., Novaes, R., Mowbray, M.: Labs of the world, unite!!! J. Grid Computing 4(3), 225–246 (2006)
Anglano, C., Canonico, M., Guazzone, M., Botta, M., Rabellino, S., Arena, S., Girardi, G.: Peer-to-peer Desktop Grids in the real world: the ShareGrid project. In: Proc. of the 8th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID’08), Lyon, France, pp. 609–614 (2008)
The ShareGrid project. http://dcs.di.unipmn.it/sharegrid. Visited on Dec. 18 2009
Cirne, W., Paranhos, D., Costa, L., Santos-Neto, E., Brasileiro, F., Sauvé, J., Silva, F.A.B., Barros, C.O., Silveira, C.: Running Bag-of-Tasks applications on computational Grids: the MyGrid approach. In: Proc. of the 2003 International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP’03), Kaohsiung, Taiwan, pp. 407–416 (2003)
Abramson, D., Giddy, J., Kotler, L.: High performance parametric modeling with Nimrod/G: killer application for the global Grid? In: Proc. of the 14th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS’00), Cancun, Mexico, pp. 520–528 (2000)
Casanova, H., Obertelli, G., Berman, F., Wolski, R.: The AppLeS parameter sweep template: user-level middleware for the Grid. Sci. Program. 8(3), 111–126 (2000)
Stiles, J., Bartol, T.M.J., Salpeter, E.E., Salpeter, M.M.: Monte Carlo simulation of neuro-transmitter release using MCell, a general simulator of cellular physiological processes. In: Proc. of the 6th Annual Conference on Computational Neuroscience: Trends in Research (CNS’97), Big Sky, MT, USA, pp. 279–284 (1998)
Smallen, S., Casanova, H., Berman, F.: Applying scheduling and tuning to on-line parallel tomography. In: Proc. of the 2001 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (SC’01), Denver, CO, USA, p. 12 (2001)
Silva, D.P.D., Cirne, W., Brasileiro, F.V.: Trading cycles for information: using replication to schedule Bag-of-Tasks applications on computational Grids. In: Proc. of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing (Euro-Par’03), Klagenfurt, Austria, pp. 169–180 (2003)
Andrade, N., Brasileiro, F., Cirne, W., Mowbray, M.: Automatic Grid assembly by promoting collaboration in Peer-to-Peer Grids. J. Parallel. Distrib. Comput. 67(8), 957–966 (2007)
Santos, R., Andrade, A., Cirne, W., Brasileiro, F., Andrade, N.: Relative autonomous accounting for Peer-to-Peer Grids. Concurrency Comput. Pract. Ex. 19(14), 1937–1954 (2007)
Anglano, C., Canonico, M., Guazzone, M.: The ShareGrid Portal: an easy way to submit jobs on computational Grids. Technical report TR-INF-2008-10-08-UNIPMN, University of Piemonte Orientale (2008)
Cavalcanti, E., Assis, L., Gaudencio, M., Cirne, W., Brasileiro, F.: Sandboxing for a free-to-join Grid with support for secure site-wide storage area. In: Proc. of the 2nd International Workshop on Virtualization Technology in Distributed Computing (VTDC’06), Tampa, FL, USA, p. 11 (2006)
Barham, P., Dragovic, B., Fraser, K., Hand, S., Harris, T., Ho, A., Neugebauer, R., Pratt, I., Warfield, A.: Xen and the art of virtualization. In: Proc. of the 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP’03), The Sagamore, Bolton Landing, NY, USA, pp. 164–177 (2003)
VMware: Business Infrastructure Virtualization. http://www.vmware.com. Visited on Dec. 18 2009
Solaris Containers. http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/containers/. Visited on Dec. 18th 2009
GARR: The Italian Academic & Research Network. http://www.garr.it. Visited on Dec. 18 2009
Blender. http://www.blender.org. Visited on Dec. 18, 2009
POV-Ray: The Persistence of Vision Raytracer. http://www.povray.org. Visited on Dec. 18, 2009.
Boero, R.: Un modello dell’economia piemontese come sistema complesso: interdipendenze economiche e territoriali tra centro e periferia. In: Russo, G., Terna, P. (eds.) Produrre a Torino. Torino, Italy (2006) (in Italian)
Boero, R.: Dinamiche espansive del settore ict in piemonte: alcune analisi esplorative tramite simulazioni basate su agenti. Technical report, IRES Piemonte, Torino, Italy (2006) (in Italian)
Tosco, P., Marini, E., Rolando, B., Lazzarato, L., Cena, C., Bertinaria, M., Fruttero, R., Reist, M., Carrupt, P.-A., Gasco, A.: Structure–antioxidant activity relationships in a series of NO-donor phenols. ChemMedChem 3(9), 1443–1448 (2008)
Anglano, C., Canonico, M.: Scheduling algorithms for multiple Bag-of-Task applications on Desktop Grids: a knowledge-free approach. In: Proc. of the 22nf IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing (IPDPS 2008), Miami, Florida USA , pp. 1–8 (2008)
Cortes, C., Vapnik, V.: Support-vector networks. Mach. Learn. 20(3), 273–297 (1995)
Basso, C., Ferrante, M., Santoro, M., Verri, A.: Automatic annotation of 3D multi-modal MR images on a Desktop-Grid. In: Proc. of the MICCAI-Grid 2009 Workshop (In Conjunction of the MICCAI’09 Conference), London, UK , pp. 56–65 (2009)
Kondo, D., Taufer, M., Brooks III, C.L., Casanova, H., Chien, A.A.: Characterizing and evaluating Desktop Grids: an empirical study. In: Proc. of the 18th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2004), Santa Fe, NM, USA (2004)
Anglano, C., Canonico, M.: Fault-Tolerant scheduling for Bag-of-Tasks Grid applications. In: Proc. of the 2005 European Grid Conference (EuroGrid’05), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, no. 3470. Amsterdam, The Netherlands (2005)
Anderson, D.P.: BOINC: a system for public-resource computing and storage. In: Proc of the 5th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing (In Conjunction of the SC’04 Conference), Pittsburgh, PA, USA, pp. 4–10 (2004)
Kacsuk, P., Kovacs, J., Farkas, Z., Marosi, A.C., Gombas, G., Balaton, Z.: SZTAKI Desktop Grid (SZDG): a flexible and scalable Desktop Grid system. J. Grid Computing 7(4), 439–461 (2009)
Fedak, G., Germain, C., Neri, V., Cappello, F.: XtremWeb: a generic global computing system. In: Proc. of the 1st IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID’01), Brisbane, Qld., Australia, pp. 582–587 (2001)
Thain, D., Livny, M.: Building reliable clients and servers. In: Foster, I., Kesselman, C. (eds.) The Grid: Blueprint for a New Computing Infrastructure, 2nd edn. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (2003)
Thain, D., Tannenbaum, T., Livny, M.: Distributed computing in practice: the Condor experience. Concurrency—Practice and Experience 17(2–4), 323–356 (2005)
Frey, J., Tannenbaum, T., Foster, I., Livny, M., Tuecke, S.: Condor-G: a computation management agent for multi-institutional Grids. In: Proc. of the 10th IEEE Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC10), San Francisco, CA, USA (2001)
Myers, D.S., Bazinet, A.L., Cummings, M.P.: Expanding the reach of Grid computing: combining Globus- and BOINC-based systems. In: Grid Computing for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, pp. 71–84. Wiley, New York (2008)
Cárdenas-Montes, M., Emmen, A., Marosi, A.C., Araujo, F., Gombás, G., Terstyanszky, G., Fedak, G., Kelley, I., Taylor, I., Lodygensky, O., Kacsuk, P., Lovas, R., Kiss, T., Balaton, Z., Farkas, Z.: EDGeS: bridging Desktop and Service Grids. In: Proc. of the 2nd Iberian Grid Infrastructure Conference (IBERGRID’2008), Porto, Portugal, pp. 212–224 (2008)
Gagliardi, F.: The EGEE European Grid infrastructure project. In: High Performance Computing for Computational Science—VECPAR 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 194–203 (2005)
Urbah, E., Kacsuk, P., Farkas, Z., Fedak, G., Kecskemeti, G., Lodygensky, O., Marosi, A., Balaton, Z., Caillat, G., Gombas, G., Kornafeld, A., Kovacs, J., He, H., Lovas, R.: EDGeS: bridging EGEE to BOINC and XtremWeb. J. Grid Computing 7(3), 335–354 (Special Issue: Grid Interoperability)
Verbeke, J., Nadgir, N., Ruetsch, G., Sharapov, I.: Framework for peer-to-peer distributed computing in a heterogeneous, decentralized environment. In: Proc. of the 3rd International Workshop on Grid Computing (GRID’02), Baltimore, MD, USA, pp. 1–12 (2002)
Seigneur, J.-M., Biegel, G., Jensen, C.D.: P2P with JXTA-Java pipes. In: Proc. of the 2nd International Conference on Principles and Practice of Programming in Java (PPPJ ’03), Kilkenny City, Ireland, pp. 207–212 (2003)
Shudo, K., Tanaka, Y., Sekiguchi, S.: P3: P2P-based middleware enabling transfer and aggregation of computational resources. In: Proc. of the 5th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID’05), vol. 1, pp. 259–266. IEEE Computer Society, Washington (2005)
Blochinger, W., Dangelmayr, C., Schulz, S.: Aspect-oriented parallel discrete optimization on the cohesion Desktop Grid platform. In: Proc. of the 6th IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGRID’06), Singapore, pp. 49–56 (2006)
Chakravarti, A.J., Baumgartner, G., Lauria, M.: The Organic Grid: Self-Organizing Computation on a Peer-to-Peer Network (2005)
Montresor, A., Meling, H., Babaoglu, O.: Messor: load-balancing through a swarm of autonomous agents. In: Proc. of the Int. Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing (AP2PC 2002). LNAI, no. 2530 (2003)
Kim, J.-S., Nam, B., Marsh, M., Keleher, P., Bhattacharjee, B., Richardson, D., Wellnitz, D., Sussman, A.: Creating a robust Desktop Grid using peer-to-peer services. In: Proc. of the IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS’07), Long Beach, CA, USA, pp. 1–7 (2007)
Novotny, J., Russell, M., Wehrens, O.: GridSphere: a portal framework for building collaborations. Concurrency Comput. Pract. Ex. 16(5), 503–513 (2004)
Abdelnur, A. Hepper, S.: JSR 168: Java Portlet Specification Version 1.0. Technical report, Sun, October (2003). Visited on Dec. 18, 2009
Foster, I. Kesselman, C.: Globus: a metacomputing infrastructure toolkit. Int J Supercomput Appl High Perform Comput 11(2), 115–128 (1997)
Romberg, M.: The UNICORE Grid infrastructure. In: Proceedings of 1st Worldwide SGI Users’ Conference, Krakow, Poland, pp. 144–153 (2000)
Laure, E., Hemmer, F., Aimar, A., Barroso, M., Buncic, P., Meglio, A.D., Guy, L., Kunszt, P., Beco, S., Pacini, F., Prelz, F., Sgaravatto, M., Edlund, A., Mulmo, O., Groep, D., Fisher, S., Livny, M.: Middleware for the next generation Grid infrastructure. In: Aimar, A., Harvey, J., Knoors, N. (eds.) Proc. of the 14th International Conference on Computing in High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics (CHEP 2004), Interlaken, Switzerland, p. 826 (2004)
Alameda, J., Christie, M., Futrelle, G.F.J., Gannon, D., Hategan, M., Kandaswamy, G., von Laszewski, G., Nacar, M.A., Pierce, M., Roberts, E., Severance, C., Thomas, M.: The open Grid computing environments collaboration: portlets and services for science gateways. Concurrency Comput. Pract. Ex. 19(6), 921–942 (2007)
von Laszewski, G., Foster, I., Gawor, J., Lane, P.: A Java commodity Grid kit. Concurrency Comput. Pract. Ex. 13(89), 643–662 (2001)
Dahan, M., Thomas, M., Roberts, E., Seth, A., Urban, T., Walling, D., Boisseau, J.R.: Grid portal toolkit 3.0 (GridPort). In: Proc of the 13rd IEEE International Symposium on High-Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC 2004), Honolulu, HI, USA, pp. 272–273 (2004)
Fowler, M.: POJO: An Acronym for Plain Old Java Object. http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/POJO.html. Visited on Dec. 18, 2009
Kacsuk, P., Sipos, G.: Multi-Grid, multi-user workflows in the P-GRADE Grid portal. J. Grid Computing 3(3), 221–238 (2005)
Berlich, R., Kunze, M., Schwarz, K.: Grid computing in Europe: from research to deployment. In: Proc. of the 2005 Australasian Workshop on Grid Computing and e-Research (AusGrid 2005). CRPIT, vol. 44, pp. 21–27. Newcastle, NSW, Australia (2005)
van Nieuwpoort, R.V., Kielmann, T., Bal, H.E.: User-friendly and reliable Grid computing based on imperfect middleware. In: Proc. of the ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (SC’07), Reno, NV (2007)
Frey, J.: Condor DAGMan: Handling Inter-job Dependencies. Technical report, University of Wisconsin (2002)
Kacsuk, P., Kiss, T., Sipos, G.: Solving the Grid interoperability problem by P-GRADE portal at workflow level. Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 24(7), 744–751 (2008)
Costa, F., Silva, L., Kelley, I., Taylor, I.: Peer-to-peer techniques for data distribution in Desktop Grid computing platforms. In: Proc. of the CoreGRID Workshop on Programming Models Grid and P2P System Architecture Grid Systems, Tools and Environments, Heraklion, Crete, Greece (2007)
Cohen, B.: Incentives build robustness in BitTorrent. In: Proc. of the 1st Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems, Berkeley, CA, USA (2003)
Wei, B., Fedak, G., Cappello, F.: Towards efficient data distribution on computational Desktop Grids with BitTorrent. Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 23(8), 983–989 (2007)
Zissimos, A., Doka, K., Chazapis, A., Koziris, N.: GridTorrent: optimizing data transfers in the Grid with collaborative sharing. In: Proc. of the 11th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics (PCI’07), Patras, Greece (2007)
Chun, B., Culler, D., Roscoe, T., Bavier, A., Peterson, L., Wawrzoniak, M., Bowman, M.: PlanetLab: an overlay testbed for broad-coverage services. Comput. Commun. Rev. 33(3), 3–12 (2003)
Anglano, C., Canonico, M.: The File Mover: high-performance data transfer for the Grid: research articles. Concurrency Comput. Pract. Ex. 20(1), 99–123 (2008)
Fedak, G., He, H., Cappello, F.: BitDew: a programmable environment for large-scale data management and distribution. In: Proc. of the 2008 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (SC’08), Austin, TX, USA, pp. 1–12 (2008)
Antoniu, G., Bougé, L., Jan, M.: JuxMem: an adaptive supportive platform for data sharing on the Grid. Scalable Comput. Pract. Experience 6(3), 45–55 (2005)
Vazhkudai, S.S., Ma, X., Freeh, V.W., Strickland, J.W., Tammineedi, N., Scott, S.L.: FreeLoader: scavenging desktop storage resources for scientific data. In: Proc. of the 2005 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing (SC’05), Seattle, WA, USA, p. 56 (2005)
Brasileiro, F., Duarte, A., Carvalho, D., Barbera, R., Scardaci, D.: An approach for the co-existence of service and opportunistic Grids: the EELA-2 case. In: Proc. of the 2nd Latin-American Grid Workshop (LAGrid 2008), Campo Grande, Brazil (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This work has been partially supported by TOP-IX and the Piemonte Region Agency under the Innovation Development Program.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Anglano, C., Canonico, M. & Guazzone, M. The ShareGrid Peer-to-Peer Desktop Grid: Infrastructure, Applications, and Performance Evaluation. J Grid Computing 8, 543–570 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-010-9162-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-010-9162-z