SUCSI: A Light-Weight Desktop Grid System Using Virtualization for Application Sandboxing

Desktop Grid has shown great success in volunteer computing, delivering huge amount computing power and storage capacity to dozens of research projects. However, small organizations benefit little from this technology. Existing Desktop Grid systems are most heavy-weight and not easy-to-use. Moreover, legacy applications with complex runtime environment are not well supported. To facilitate the cooperation within small institutions and overcome these difficulties, we propose a new Desktop Grid system, Shandong University Cycle Stealing Infrastructure (SUCSI). SUCSI is light-weight and can be deployed without additional server computer. Virtualization is used for application sand boxing in SUCSI, so legacy applications are not trouble any more. This paper will give details on the architecture and some other issues of SUCSI.