Conillon: A lightweight distributed computing platform for desktop grids

We describe a novel, lightweight platform for distributed computing called Conillon. This platform allows regular workstations to function as compute nodes in a desktop grid. Conillon runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and computational resources from any architecture for which the JVM is implemented can thus be used. Many existing distributed computing platforms are either complex or only allow for one type of job to be deployed. Conillon is lightweight and simple to use and yet allows any number of different jobs to be deployed and executed in parallel. Entirely new jobs can, in fact, be added dynamically. In this paper, we discuss the architecture and features of Conillon. We report on a series of experiments in which we test scalability, fault tolerance, and computation of different types of jobs on the same compute nodes.