Abstract:
Any major Ethiopian institution has a substantial number of computer systems on its campus,
often in the scale of thousands. Mutka [16] measured the overall available time of a group of
workstations at the University of Wisconsin, and found that a workstation is idle and
available for computation 70% of the time. This study can be taken as indication that most of
the computational resources available in Ethiopia higher education are underutilized. Given
that a large amount of scientific computing isappropriate for execution in an opportunistic
environment, a campus grid is an inexpensive way to build a powerful computational
resource. Desktop grids, which use the idle cycles of many desktop PC’s, are currently the
largest distributed systems in the world. While the motivation for using desktop resources is
clear, namely the opportunity to perform large computations at low-cost, the main challenge
is that the resources are volatile. Despite Desktop grid systems have been successfully used
for many high throughput applications, there has been little insight into the detailed temporal
structure of CPU availability of desktop grid resources and the performance of the
underlining networks that hinder its usability. Host characterization is essential for accurate
performance measuring and modeling of such platforms. In Ethiopia such platform is in the
infant state and no institution has been building such infrastructure. This structure is critical
to characterize the performance of desktop grid platform. In this study attempt has been done
to address the following questions: (i) what are the temporal characteristics of desktop CPU
availability in public higher institutions setting? (ii) How do these characteristics affect the
performance and availability of desktop grids? (iii) Based on these characteristics, can we
construct a model with quantifiable performance that satisfy higher institution needs and
requirement with cost effective way?
To realize the fact we developed and implement a model of desktop grids with a research
settings in Arba Minch University, and present host availability and volatility measurements
for 500 utility workstations and measure CPU Execution availability within desktop grids
which constitute 30 hosts by running HTcondor open source desktop grid software. We utilize
these measurements to characterize CPU and Execution availability and develop a
performance model for desktop grid in case of Arba Minch University.
