An architecture for P2P bag-of-tasks execution with multiple task allocation policies in desktop grids

In this paper, we propose and evaluate a flexible architecture for desktop grids that supports multiple task allocation policies on top of a structured P2P overlay. In our proposal, a Bag-of-Tasks application is submitted to random nodes and placed in their local queue, that is processed in a FIFO way. When a node becomes idle, a task allocation policy is executed that fetches tasks from remote nodes. The proposed architecture is flexible since it is decoupled from both the P2P middleware and the P2P overlay. A prototype of the proposed architecture was implemented on top of the JXTA middleware, using the Chord P2P search overlay. The results obtained in a 16-machine heterogeneous desktop grid show that very good performance gains are obtained with multiple task allocation policies. Also, a speedup of 9.85 was achieved for an application composed of 270 network flow balancing tasks, reducing its wallclock execution time from 32.51 min to 3.3 min.