Non-Dedicated Distributed Environment: A Solution for Safe and Continuous Exploitation of Idle Cycles

Abstract

The Non-Dedicated Distributed Environment (NDDE) aims to muster the idle processing power of interactive computers (workstations or PCs) into a virtual resource for parallel applications and grid computing. NDDE is novel in the sense that it allows for safe and continuous use of idle cycles. Differently from existing solutions, NDDE applications run inside a virtual machine rather than on the user environment. Besides safe and continuous cycle exploitation, this approach enables NDDE applications to run on an operating system other than that used interactively. Our preliminary results suggest that NDDE can in fact harvests most of the idle cycles and has almost no impact on the interactive user.