Green Flexible Opportunistic Computing with task consolidation and virtualization

Energy efficiency and high computing power are basic design considerations across modern-day computing solutions due to different concerns such as system perfor- mance, operational cost, and environmental issues. Desktop Grid and Volunteer Computing System (DGVCS) so called opportunistic infrastructures offer computational power at low cost focused on harvesting idle computing cycles of ex- isting commodity computing resources. Other than allow- ing to customize the end user offer, virtualization is consid- ered as one key techniques to reduce energy consumption in large-scale systems and contributes to the scalability of the system. This paper presents an energy efficient approach for opportunistic infrastructures based on task consolidation and customization of virtual machines. The experimental re- sults with single desktops and complete computer rooms show that virtualization significantly improves the energy-efficiency of opportunistic grids compared with dedicated computing systems without disturbing the end-user.