GNet : a cpn-based simulation platform of volunteer computing

In the absence of simulation tools, it takes risks in terms of costs and cycles to develop and evaluate a volunteer computing system in the real web-based environment, which is very dynamic and uncertain. Based on the expressiveness of concurrent events of Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) and the synchronous channels of Renew - a reference net formalism of CPNs from the University of Hamburg, we have designed and implemented GNet - a general simulation and evaluation platform of volunteer computing. In current version of GNet1.0, we have two main contributions: fast prototyping and evaluation of resource management strategies; easily migrating the evaluated work into the developments of real systems. The above features come from the three design and fully implemented simulation goals of GNet1.0: scalability, applicability, and adaptive parallelism and fault-tolerance. This paper presents the design methodologies of GNet and directions of future work of GNet1.x and GNet2.x versions.