Empirical Studies on the Behavior of Resource Availability in Fine-Grained Cycle Sharing Systems

Fine-grained cycle sharing (FGCS) systems aim at utilizing the large amount of computational resources available on the Internet. In FGCS, host computers allow guest jobs to utilize the CPU cycles if the jobs do not significantly impact local host users. Such resources are generally provided voluntarily and their availability fluctuates highly. Guest jobs may fail unexpectedly, as resource becomes unavailable. We present empirical studies on the detection and predictability of resource availability in FGCS systems. A multi-state availability model is derived from a study of resource behavior. The model combines generic hardware-software failures with domain-specific resource behavior in FGCS. To understand the predictability, we traced resource availability in a production FGCS system for three months. We found that the daily patterns of resource availability are comparable to those in recent history. This observation suggests the feasibility of predicting future resource availability, which can be applied for proactive management of guest jobs