Organizing a User-Created Computing Environment by RESTful Web Service Open APIs in Desktop Grids

Abstract

The Desktop Grid Systems (DGSs) have supported a resource-providing environment for large-scale applications, utilizing the idle CPU cycle of the desktop computers connected over the Internet. Moreover, a variety of large-scale applications, such as an analysis of genome sequence in biotechnology, climate prediction in meteorology, etc., has been successfully run on DGSs. However, the development of DGSs has mainly focused on completely implementing the platform server taking the responsibility of task and resource managements. To date, any standard APIs that are specifically targeted for the application developers of DGSs are not provided, so passively maintaining and monitoring the overall execution procedure of applications. This results in complex and tedious tasks for submitting an application to DGSs, monitoring its execution status, and receiving its final results. Because of this, it makes DGSs less attractive for application developers. In this regard, there is a need of developing a systematic and synthetic framework, under which application developers can actively submit their own applications to DGSs and make the best use of computation results practically. In this paper, we present a user-created computing framework for desktop grids, which makes application developers utilize DGSs easily and conveniently as a computational tool by providing RESTful web service open APIs for application developers.