Volunteer Computing and Desktop Cloud: The Cloud@Home Paradigm

Only commercial cloud solutions have been implemented so far, offering computing resources and services for renting. Some interesting projects, such as Nimbus, OpenNEbula, Reservoir, work on cloud. One of their aims is to provide a cloud infrastructure able to provide and share resources and services for scientific purposes. The encouraging results of volunteer computing projects in this context and the flexibility of the cloud, suggested to address our research efforts towards a combined new computing paradigm we named Cloud@Home.On one hand it can be considered as a generalization of the @homephilosophy, knocking down the barriers of volunteer computing, and also allowing to share more general services. On the other hand, Cloud@Home can be considered as the enhancement of the grid-utility vision of cloud computing. In this new paradigm, userspsila hosts are not passive interface to cloud services anymore, but they can interact (free or by charge) with other clouds. In this paper we present the Cloud@Home paradigm, highlighting its contribution to the actual state of the art on the topic of distributed and cloud computing. We detail the functional architecture and the core structure implementing such paradigm, demonstrating how it is really possible to build up a Cloud@Home infrastructure.