Quasi-opportunistic supercomputing

[2] The applications based on the BOINC grid have reached multi-petaflop levels by using close to half a million computers connected on the internet, whenever volunteer resources become available.

[10] Although general grid computing has had success in parallel task execution, demanding supercomputer applications such as weather simulations or computational fluid dynamics have remained out of reach, partly due to the barriers in reliable sub-assignment of a large number of tasks as well as the reliable availability of resources at a given time.

[2][10][9] The opportunistic Internet PrimeNet Server supports GIMPS, one of the earliest grid computing projects since 1997, researching Mersenne prime numbers.

[14] Although different parts of a program executing within DEISA may be running on computers located in different countries under different ownerships and administrations, there is more control and coordination than with a purely opportunistic approach.

[15][16] The quasi-opportunistic paradigm aims to overcome this by achieving more control over the assignment of tasks to distributed resources and the use of pre-negotiated scenarios for the availability of systems within the network.

[18] The other key component of the quasi-opportunistic approach is a reliable message passing system to provide distributed checkpoint restart mechanisms when computer hardware or networks inevitably experience failures.