Overview on Clouds@home: Virtualization Mechanism for Volunteer Computing
Mohammadfazel Anjomshoa, Mazleena Salleh · 2014
The advent of Grid computing has enhanced the internet trend in the way that by using hardware resources of other computers, personal computers have become an unrivaled superpower. By utilizing several mechanisms such as downloading a screen saver large-scale scientic research systems are allowed to employ the resources of PCs during idle time. BOINC is a well-known volunteer computing middleware that establishes the powerful processing power from the resources oered by donors. BOINC has two limitations: rst, it does not provide adequate security for users; second, applications that run on BOINC platform are conned to platform of systems (e.g., Windows, Linux, etc.). Virtualization is used for hiding physical resources of system from the operating system. On the one hand, by enabling Virtualization, applications run in a safe environment and so security will be enhanced. On the other hand, Virtualization solved the problem of platform-dependent on applications. Volunteer cloud system or Clouds@home has considered as a new form of cloud computing that builds its infrastructure from volunteer computers. With mixing cloud computing and volunteer computing we can build new computing paradigm that has both commercial and volunteer viewpoints. This study introduces a mechanism that enables Virtualization for applications that run on BOINC platform. This new computing paradigm has considered as primitive steps towards deploying Clouds@home.