Improving “tail” computations in a BOINC-based Desktop Grid

Abstract

A regular Desktop Grid bag-of-tasks project can take a lot of time to complete computations. An important part of the process is tail computations: when the number of tasks to perform becomes less than the number of computing nodes. At this stage, a dynamic replication could be used to reduce the time needed to complete computations. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model and a strategy of dynamic replication at the tail stage. The results of the numerical experiments are given.