High performance computing in resource poor settings: An approach based on volunteer computing

High Performance Computing (HPC) systems aim to solve complex computing problems (in a short amount of time) that are either too large for standard computers or would take too long. They are used to solve computational problems in many fields such as medical science (for drug discovery, breast cancer detection in images, etc.), climate science, physics, mathematical science, etc. Existing solutions such as HPC Supercomputer, HPC Cluster, HPC Cloud or HPC Grid are not adapted for resource poor settings (mainly for developing countries) because their fees are generally beyond the funding (particularly for academics) and the administrative complexity to access to HPC Grid creates a higher barrier. This paper presents an approach allowing to build a Volunteer Computing system for HPC in resource poor settings. This solution does not require any additional investment in hardware, but relies instead on voluntary machines already owned by the private users. The experiment has been made on the mathematical problem of solving the matrices multiplication using Volunteer Computing system. Given the success of this experiment, the enrollment of other volunteers has already started. The goal being to create a powerful Volunteer Computing system with the maximum number of computers. © 2013 The Science and Information (SAI) Organization.