This work describes a programming model and performance model for cycle stealing on the Internet. Cycle stealing is the use of otherwise idle computers to perform work, and promises high performance computing at relatively low cost. The Internet, being the largest pool of potentially idle computers, is an obvious target for cycle stealing. However, computers connected to the Internet are often protected by firewalls, preventing point-to-point communication between them. The fluctuating avail-ability of computers for cycle stealing as they move in and out of an idle state, combined with the restricted communication of the Internet environment, means that programming models and abstractions suitable for programming supercom-puters and clusters are not ideal. Therefore, I have created a programming model for cycle stealing which reflects the types of parallel applications that are suitable for execution using idle computers connected to the Internet. The model is de-signed for use by non-expert parallel programmers, and I will show how it simpli-fies the development of cycle stealing applications, enabling rapid application de-velopment, and straightforward porting of existing sequential applications. This simple to use programming model, combined with the low cost of cycle stealing, improves the accessibility of high performance computing to non-traditional us-ers of supercomputers and clusters. Deployment on the Internet, and the need to navigate through firewalls, suggests a web based framework using common web protocols, web servers and web browsers. Part of this work investigates the feasibility of web based approaches to cycle stealing, from the setup of a cycle stealing system, application development and deployment, and connection of potentially idle computers. I designed and implemented a cycle stealing framework, deployable on the web, to meet expec-tations of performance, reliability, ease of use and safety. Existing cycle stealing frameworks emphasise the need for applications to be de-composed into a set of jobs that execute for a long period, that is, a job should have a computation time sufficient to justify its communication cost. However, there are no tools available for users to determine what an appropriate computa-tion time might be, given a job's data communication requirements. To date, de-ciding the granularity of jobs has been a matter of intuition. Therefore, a user may experience uncertainty as to the benefit of cycle stealing for their particular application, especially if the applications will have relatively short-lived jobs. Based on performance analysis of my framework, I have developed an analytical model and simulator, which can be used to predict, and help to optimise, the per-formance of user applications, and show the feasibility of executing a particular application using the cycle stealing framework.

Ordinary desktop computers continue to obtain ever more resources – in-creased processing power, memory, network speed and bandwidth – yet these resources spend much of their time underutilised. Cycle stealing frameworks harness these resources so they can be used for high-performance computing. Traditionally cycle stealing systems have used client-server based architectures which place significant limits on their ability to scale and the range of applica-tions they can support. By applying a fully decentralised network model to cycle stealing the limits of centralised models can be overcome. Using decentralised networks in this manner presents some difficulties which have not been encountered in their previous uses. Generally decentralised ap-plications do not require any significant fault tolerance guarantees. High-performance computing on the other hand requires very stringent guarantees to ensure correct results are obtained. Unfortunately mechanisms developed for traditional high-performance computing cannot be simply translated because of their reliance on a reliable storage mechanism. In the highly dynamic world of P2P computing this reliable storage is not available. As part of this research a fault tolerance system has been created which provides considerable reliability without the need for a persistent storage. As well as increased scalability, fully decentralised networks offer the ability for volunteers to communicate directly. This ability provides the possibility of supporting applications whose tasks require direct, message passing style communication. Previous cycle stealing systems have only supported embarrassingly parallel applications and applications with limited forms of communication so a new programming model has been developed which can support this style of communication within a cycle stealing context. In this thesis I present a fully decentralised cycle stealing framework. The framework addresses the problems of providing a reliable fault tolerance sys-tem and supporting direct communication between parallel tasks. The thesis includes a programming model for developing cycle stealing applications with direct inter-process communication and methods for optimising object locality on decentralised networks.