Effectiveness Evaluation of Parallel Volunteer Computing

Volunteer computing (VC) is a type of network computing which exploits idle computing resources provided by vast amount of users on the Internet. In our previous work, we have implemented a prototype system of parallel VC with the approach of server assisted communication and demonstrated the feasibility of parallel computing on a VC environment, not distributed computing as in the current VC. In this paper, we evaluate the effectiveness of parallel VC. The nature of nodes' volatility and unreliability in VC makes parallel computing not always effective. Through the simulations using open trace data of nodes' behavior, we reveal parallelism and redundancy of job execution which minimize execution time while maintaining high degree of reliability.