Towards Real-Time, Volunteer Distributed Computing

Abstract

Many large-scale distributed computing applications demand real-time responses by soft deadlines. To enable such real-time task distribution and execution on the volunteer resources, we previously proposed the design of the real-time volunteer computing platform called RT-BOINC. The system gives low O(1) worst-case execution time for task management operations, such as task scheduling, state transitioning, and validation. In this work, we present a full implementation RT-BOINC, adding new features including deadline timer and parameter-based admission control. We evaluate RT-BOINC at large scale using two real-time applications, namely, the games Go and Chess. The results of our case study show that RT-BOINC provides much better performance than the original BOINC in terms of average and worst-case response time, scalability and efficiency.