A computational field framework for collaborative task execution in volunteer clouds

The increasing diffusion of cloud technologies offers new opportunities for distributed and collaborative computing. Volunteer clouds are a prominent example, where participants join and leave the platform and collaborate by sharing computational resources. The high complexity, dynamism and unpredictability of such scenarios call for decentralized self-* approaches. We present in this paper a framework for the design and evaluation of self-adaptive collaborative task execution strategies in volunteer clouds. As a byproduct, we propose a novel strategy based on the Ant Colony Optimization paradigm, that we validate through simulation-based statistical analysis over Google cluster data.