Customizable execution environments with virtual desktop grid computing
Daniel Lombraña González, Francisco Fernández de Vega, Leonardo Trujillo, Gustavo Olague, Ben Segal · IASTED International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Systems · 2007
Nowadays, desktop machines have good features in terms of computing power, but they are still normally underused at research centers (universities, companies, etc.). On the other hand, some researchers cannot solve very complex problems because they lack sufficient computing power. In this paper, we propose to exploit commodity machines by using Desktop Grid Computing (DGC) technology. Moreover, we employ this kind of infrastructure allowing researchers to deploy and run their applications without any code changes. The goal is to provide an on-demand customized execution environment where scientists can load and run their applications and experiments without worrying about the underlying hardware and operating systems of the client desktop machines. Our proposal achieves this objective by using a DGC technology, such as BOINC, in conjunction with a Virtual Machine technology like VMware. In this paper we introduce this new approach to DGC computing and analyze the successful results that we have obtained.