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Task allocation in volunteer computing networks under monetary budget constraints

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Abstract

In volunteer computing networks, the peers contribute to the solution of a computationally intensive problem by freely providing their computational resources, i.e., without seeking any immediate financial benefit. In such networks, although the peers can set certain bounds on how much their resources can be exploited by the network, the monetary cost that the network brings to the peers is unclear. In this work, we propose a volunteer computing network where the peers can set monetary budgets, limiting the financial burden incurred on them due the usage of their computational resources. Under the assumption that the price of the electricity consumed by the peers has temporal variation, we show that our approach leads to an interesting task allocation problem, where the goal is to maximize the amount of work done by the peers without violating the monetary budget constraints set by them. We propose various heuristics as solution to the problem, which is NP-hard. Our extensive simulations using realistic data traces and real-life electricity prices demonstrate that the proposed techniques considerably increase the amount of useful work done by the peers, compared to a baseline technique.

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Notes

  1. SETI@Home, http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/index.php.

  2. Folding@Home, http://folding.stanford.edu/.

  3. ClimatePrediction, http://climateprediction.net/.

  4. ABC@Home, http://abcathome.com/.

  5. In the rest of the paper, we refer to the central authority as the dispatcher.

  6. In our work, we assume that the budgets are set on a weekly basis. Some of the solutions presented in Section 3 will be based on this assumption.

  7. We assume that each peer has a single CPU with varying clock frequencies.

  8. https://sites.google.com/a/ku.edu.tr/p2p-simulator/

  9. https://www.comed.com/customer-service/rates-pricing/real-time-pricing/Pages/rate-besh-pricing-tool.aspx

  10. http://www.energy.eu/

  11. http://www.eia.gov/countries/prices/electricity_{h}ouseholds.cfm

  12. http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm

  13. http://ark.intel.com/

  14. Charity Engine, http://www.charityengine.com/.

  15. Clouds and Peer-to-Peer, http://berkeleyclouds.blogspot.com/2009/06/clouds-and-peer-to-peer.html.

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Acknowledgment

This work was partially supported by the COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) framework, under Action IC0804: Energy efficiency in large scale distributed systems, and by TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey) under Grant 109M761. An early version of this work was presented as a poster in W-PIN+NetECON 2013: The joint workshop on Pricing and Incentives in Networks and Systems in conjunction with ACM SIGMETRICS 2013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Huseyin Guler & Oznur Ozkasap

  2. Yahoo Labs, Barcelona, Spain

    B. Barla Cambazoglu

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  1. Huseyin Guler
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  2. B. Barla Cambazoglu
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  3. Oznur Ozkasap
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Correspondence to Huseyin Guler.

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Guler, H., Cambazoglu, B.B. & Ozkasap, O. Task allocation in volunteer computing networks under monetary budget constraints. Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. 8, 938–951 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12083-014-0301-3

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