Siyapath: A P2P gossip based volunteer computing framework

Abstract

This paper presents Siyapath, a distributed volunteer computing framework prototype. It takes a novel approach in solving the problem of increasing demand for high performance computing. High performance computing addresses the demands on computationally intensive tasks. Volunteer computing is one approach to address the high performance computing requirements. Volunteer computing uses computational power volunteered by the general public, to perform computationally intensive tasks in a distributed manner. A volunteer computing framework provides the infrastructure for a volunteer computing network to operate. The solution presented, Siyapath, is a peer-to-peer, gossip based volunteer computing framework. Existing volunteer computing framework implementations are discussed in this paper, along with their pitfalls and fallacies. The peer-to-peer architecture was incorporated into Siyapath with the intention of overcoming drawbacks present in volunteer computing frameworks based on a client-server architecture. Siyapath uses the functionality provided by Apache Thrift as a cross-language services development framework and uses a gossip based protocol for communication. How Thrift and gossip based protocols help to improve the performance of theframework is also discussed. A proof-of-concept implementation of Siyapath has been completed which comprises of the basic functionality of a volunteer computing framework. Details of this design and implementation are described in the paper. Performance tests including a load test and a scalability test have been carried out to measure how the framework performs as the network scales. fn the latter part of the paper, the results of the tests are presented and analyzed.