Currently, volunteer computing is used for high throughput computing, but it is not used for parallel applications based on MPI due to the difficulty in communicating among computing peers. As Sarmenta and Hirano (1999) said, there are several research issues to be solved in volunteer computing platforms, one of them is 鈥榠mplementing other types of applications鈥? In fact, the BOINC team (the well known volunteer computing development platform) is requesting 鈥楳PI-like support鈥?for volunteer computing as one of its hot topics.
This paper proposes an extension of the usual capabilities of volunteer computing and desktop grid systems by allowing the execution of parallel applications, based on MPI, on these types of platforms. The goal of this paper is to describe a method to transform and adapt MPI applications in order to allow the execution of this type of applications on volunteer computing platforms and desktop grids. The proposed approach does not require an MPI installation on the client鈥檚 side, which keeps the software to be installed on the client quite lightweight. The paper describes the prototype built, and also shows the evaluation made of this prototype, in order to test the viability of the idea proposed in this article, with promising results.