GiGi: An Ocean of Gridlets on a "Grid-for-the-Masses"

There have been a few proposals aiming at bridging the gap between institutional grid infrastructures (e.g., Globus-based), popular cycle-sharing applications (e.g., SETIQhome), and massively used decentralized P2P file-sharing applications. Nonetheless, no such infrastructure was ever successful in allowing, in a large-scale, home users to run popular desktop applications faster, by using spare cycles in other users' machines and, in return, donate their spare cycles to run other users' applications. We present a novel application and programming model that was designed to overcome some of the barriers to the deployment of a generic peer-to-peer grid infrastructure. In particular, we want to enable a trivial deployment in such infrastructures of existing applications that are in widespread use but do not currently exploit parallelism for improved performance. The model presented in this paper revolves around the concept of a Gridlet, a semantics-aware unit of workload division and computation off-load. A gridlet is a chunk of data associated with the operations to be performed on the data, and in many cases these operations consist of unmodified application binaries. Moreover, the concept of gridlet is also employed for resource management, and accounting of peer contribution. We believe this new concept, absent in other proposals, will significantly lower the barriers for exploiting parallel execution in popular applications, thus improving the chances of the gridlet model being widely adopted.