Web2Grid: Desktop Grids for Web 2.0
Marosi Attila Csaba <>
MTA SZTAKI
The Web2Grid project aims to combine Web 2.0 and Grid technologies, which would provide significant advantage for both worlds. This way Web 2.0 would not only be able to utilize social content, but would be able to share the computing resources required for services using Grid technologies. The Web2Grid project investigates these ideas, develops services, interfaces, tools and methodologies for for both institutional and public/volunteer desktop grid environments. Desktop grid processes the computation intensive tasks of the Web 2.0 services, but also gathers computing resources through social network sites. From the many achievements of the project in this paper I'll discuss some of the extensions provided for the BOINC desktop grid environment:
First the problem is the remote task submission to the desktop grid system. It is solved by using the '3G Bridge' which allows exactly that and solves the interoperability between different grids on the task level.
All computed results returned to the server need to be checked (validated). Validation is an application specific task, and it is the task of the validator component to decide which results can be considered correct. This validator is running on the desktop grid server since all results are uploaded here by the clients. This means unfortunately that a third party component which is considered as part of the application and not as part of the server is running on the server. Web2Grid aims to provide grid resources for as many as possible Web 2.0 services, but this cannot compromise security, thus all third party running components must be moved to a separate resource and shielded from the desktop grid server, but still the solution must be transparent for the application and validator developers.
The project aims to motivate people to donate resources by giving virtual credits for each computed task. This requires that an accounting service is provided which is able to tell the users how many credits they have and how many tasks their resources computed and does that in an interoperable way for the Web 2.0 service and the desktop grid.
Finally a task to be solved comes from the fact that the interface of the desktop grid system is to be hidden from the resource donors, thus all data required for authentication and user management must be gathered remotely. All signup and user management is done on the social networking sites.