Discovering Resources and Scheduling Concurrent Bag-of-Tasks Applications in Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Volunteer Desktop Grids

MPhil Thesis Defence


Title: "Discovering Resources and Scheduling Concurrent Bag-of-Tasks Applications in 
Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Volunteer Desktop Grids"

By

Mr. Shun-Kit Kwan


Abstract

Internet-scale volunteer desktop grids allow multiple applications to execute 
concurrently on heterogeneous and dynamic platforms. In this paper we explore 
the problem of discovering resources and scheduling multiple Bag-of-Task (BoT) 
applications in unstructured peer-to-peer (P2P) volunteer desktop grids using a 
super-based approach. This approach tackles the single-point failure and 
scalability problems faced by centralized and distributed approaches. A 
light-weight change driven gossip protocol is used to exchange resource 
availability information aimed at (1) providing a good degree of speed-up in 
bag turnaround time, and (2) minimizing the control message overhead to 
maintain scalability. We present a comprehensive study of the properties of 
fixed threshold and adaptive threshold based gossiping mechanisms using 
detailed simulation experiments. Our results indicate that while gossiping with 
fixed threshold reflects resource usage effectively in a scalable network, an 
adaptive gossip threshold mechanism based on a simple feedback mechanism 
considering system state adapts much better to a volatile environment with 
small latency, reduced overhead and yields better system performance compared 
to fixed threshold protocols.


Date:			Tuesday, 22 June 2010

Time:			2:00pm – 4:00pm

Venue:			Room 3501
 			Lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Jogesh Muppala (Supervisor)
 			Dr. Brahim Bensaou (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Charles Zhang


**** ALL are Welcome ****