In the paper we focus on analysis of performance and power consumption statistics for two modern environments used for computing – volunteer and cluster based systems. The former integrate computational power donated by volunteers from their own locations, often towards social oriented or targeted initiatives, be it of medical, mathematical or space nature. The latter is meant for high performance computing and is typically installed...

In this paper, a volunteer grid called Comcute is studied. Moreover, the harmony search scheduler is proposed. This scheduler has been designed for efficient using some resources of volunteer grid. The harmony search scheduler optimizes both a workload of a bottleneck computer and the cost of grid. Finally, some experiment outcomes have been discussed.

A model of computational quality in large-scale computing systems was presented in the previous chapter of this book. This model describes three quality attributes: performance, reliability and energy efficiency. We assumed that all processes in the system are incessantly ready to perform calculations and that communication between the processes occurs immediately. These assumptions are not true for grid and volunteer computing...

The chapter proposes additional solutions that can be implemented within the Comcute system to increase its configurability. This refers to configuration of the reliability level in the W and S server layers, static or on-the-fly data partitioning and integration, configuration of the system for processing in the data streaming fashion, extending the system for selection of a project that the client wants to contribute to, ease...

In this paper, a combination between volunteer computing and crowdsourcing is presented. Two paradigms of the web computing are described, analyzed and compared in detail: grid computing and volunteer computing. Characteristics of BOINC and its contribution to global Internet processing are shown with the stress put onto applications the system can facilitate and problems it can solve. An alternative instance of a grid computing...