Survey on Volunteer Computing Frameworks for Scientific Applications

Scientific applications require immense computing power to produce quantifiable results. Computing power is a measure of the resource capacity offered by a computer. Scientific applications generally utilize supercomputers since they have very high computing power. Supercomputers are expensive and are not accessible to the general public. This is a problem for scientific application developers without access to supercomputers. The advent of volunteer computing is a solution for scientific application developers without access to supercomputers. Volunteer computing involves the use of a cluster of general purpose computers which have volunteered their computing power, resources and services to the scientific application. Keywords—Distributed computing, volunteer computing, grid computing, BOINC, scientific application, framework, Akka.io, Apache Airavata. I. INTRODUCTION The world is filled with immense problems of great complexity. Research scientists work on solving or coming closer to the solution to these problems. Quite a lot of mathematical findings, biomedical research, biological advancement, findings in engineering, etc. have the use of computers in them. Greater the complexity of the problem, greater is the need for computing power. Supercomputers are generally used for scientific applications and experimentation on tasks of great complexity. Supercomputers are expensive, need special storing conditions and are not accessible to everybody. They are restricted only to universities and private organizations. Volunteer computing is a type of computing where machines distributed over a network, owned by the general public solicit a small part of their resources and computing power to help provide the necessary resources for a scientific application. This reduces the cost of the infrastructure to a minimum and provides results like that of a single supercomputer. There are several frameworks available in the market. BOINC, Akka.io and Apache Airavata are distributed volunteer computing frameworks having unique models to distribute, organize and maintain tasks involved in a scientific application.