A Parallel Volunteer Computing System Based on Server Assisted Communication

Volunteer computing (VC) is one of the distributed computing paradigms, which exploits idle computing resources provided by vast amount of users on the Internet. In VC, individual nodes are usually unable to communicate with each other directly; therefore, current VC supports only bag-of-tasks computation, and this prevents widespread use of VC. Toward the realization of parallel VC, this paper proposes a parallel VC system based on the concept of server assisted communication. The proposed method replaces inter-node communication with a pair of two request-driven communication between sender/server and server/receiver. In the proposed parallel VC system, a VC server consists of an Apache web server and a MySQL database server, to ease the implementation of multi-threaded communication and stable and efficient data-management functions. A software tool is also developed to convert a parallel program written with a common MPI communication library into a program with a standard socket library with HTTP protocol. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system, we have implemented the parallel VC system and evaluated the execution time of basic communication functions and parallel programs in NAS parallel benchmarks. The results show that the execution time of basic communication functions is acceptable for the practical use of VC and benchmark programs are successfully executed on the proposed systems, demonstrating the feasibility of parallel computation in VC environments. © 2025 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC.