GenWrapper: A generic wrapper for running legacy applications on desktop grids

Desktop grids represent an alternative trend in grid computing using the same software infrastructure as volunteer computing projects, such as BOINC. Applications to be deployed on a BOINC infrastructure need special preparations. However, there are many legacy applications, that have either no source code available or would require too much effort to port. For these applications BOINC provides a wrapper. This wrapper can handle the simple cases and it is configurable, but it can only be used to execute a list of legacy executables (tasks) one after the other. GenWrapper aims to provide a generic solution for wrapping and executing an arbitrary set of legacy applications by utilizing a POSIX like shell scripting environment to describe how the application is to be run and how the work unit should be processed. This is realized by an extended version of BusyBox providing the most common UNIX commands and a POSIX shell interpreter in a single executable with a special applet (BusyBox extension) to make BOINC API functions accessible from the shell on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X platforms. In this paper we present how GenWrapper works and how it can be used to port legacy applications to desktop grid systems.