End hosts clustering based on resources availability in Volunteer Computing

Volunteer Computing (VC) is an approach under grid computing which prepares a platform for computer owners around the globe to donate their resources at internet based VC projects like as SETI@home, Folding@hom. Therefore, global desktop grid is a VC that includes hosts who present their resources to solve some kind of CPU, RAM or Disk spaceintensive problems. At the moment, the common approach used in resource scheduling in VC is mostly based on CPU availability alone. However, we believe that RAM and disk space of the volunteering hosts also play a role in ensuring an optimized assignment of a job to a host, and hence, could lead to an improved resource scheduling performance of the VC. As an initial step to support the above proposal, a formula for normalizing the three different resource information, i.e., CPU, RAM, and disk space, into common representations is developed. In this paper, the normalization formula is presented as well as the formula for calculating the average availability of three resources. Besides, the results from applying the two formulas to a data set extracted from http://fta.inria.fr/res/ are also given. The results show a significant support to the potential of the proposed approach. Impact of this research to the organization will be execution of their tasks' project in suitable cluster of volunteers with specified weighted mean of resources. © 2013 IEEE.