Combining Grid, Cloud and Volunteer Computing

Project Specification

Testing and further developing an infrastructure based on CernVM that enables launching jobs on volunteer nodes, cluster nodes and commercial cloud nodes. This technology will support a CERN educational game called Virtual Atom Smasher. 

Abstract

Due to hardware and parallelization constraints, distributing resource demanding computational tasks and assigning them to a grid of commercial or volunteer private nodes is a one-way solution. The cloud is undeniably the model that will, if it has not already, dominate in the field of computing. Numerous new cloud services appear constantly in the literature and the ones that were once state of the art are currently ported there. It is pretty much straight forward that the exploitation of such practices is critical for any notable effort. The purpose of this project was to combine the aforementioned entities, take advantage of top notch technologies and motivate citizens to participate in mass computing campaigns by offering the resources that they have in their possession.