Managing volunteer resources in the cloud

Cloud computing is an attractive emerging technology for wide area applications that usually require huge amount of computational, storage and sensing resources. A very challenging scenario merges cloud computing with the volunteer paradigm, where companies, communities and/or single users offer their contributions to a project or share their own services. In this paper, we propose a technique for the resource management in volunteer-clouds, with specific reference to the Cloud@Home framework. Our solution is based on a logical organisation of all the resources into a hierarchical cluster, implementing autonomic, distributed and self-adapting algorithms to manage the hierarchical infrastructure according to the resource availability variations. We also discuss the results obtained from the evaluation of a preliminary implementation of the proposed resource management system.