THE CLOUD@HOME ARCHITECTURE - Building a Cloud Infrastructure from Volunteered Resources

Ideas coming from volunteer computing can be borrowed and incorporated into the Cloud computing model. The result is a volunteer Cloud where the infrastructure is obtained by merging heterogeneous resources offered by different domains and/or providers such as other Clouds, Grid farms, clusters, and datacenters, till single desktops. This new paradigm maintains the benefits of Cloud computing (such as service oriented interfaces, dynamic service provisioning, guaranteed QoS) as well as those of volunteer computing (such as usage of idle resources and reduced costs of operation). This paper describes the architecture of Cloud@Home, a system that mixes both worlds by providing mechanisms for aggregating, enrolling, and managing the resources, and that takes into account SLA and QoS requirements