C3P: A Re-Configurable Framework to Design Cycle-sharing Computing Cloud Platforms

A new era of High-Performance Computing has been coming about during the last decade. The overabundance of resources lying idle throughout the Internet, for long periods of time, calls for resource-sharing infrastructures operating in the settings of the Cluster, Grid, P2P and Cloud. Many organizations own grids, frequently underutilized, but impose several restrictions to their usage by outside users. Despite the already extensive study in the field of Grid and Cloud computing, no solution was ever successful in reaching out to typical home users and their resource-intensive commodity applications. This is especially lacking in an open environment with no cost and low access barriers (e.g. authentication, configuration). We propose C$^3$P, a comprehensive distributed cycle-sharing framework for enabling the sharing of computational resources in a decentralized and free computing cloud platform, across large-scale networks and thus improve the performance of commonly used applications. C$^3$P encompasses the following activities: application adaptation, job scheduling, resource discovery, reliability of job results and overlay network management. C$^3$P evaluation shows that any ordinary Internet user is able to easily and effectively take advantage of remote resources, namely CPU cycles, for their own benefit; or provide spare cycles to other users, getting incentives in return, in a free, yet fair and managed global infrastructure.