Desktop grids have traditionally focused on executing computation intensive workloads. Can they also be used to execute data-intensive workloads? To answer this question, the authors present a case study of a data intensive biometric application which is infeasible to process on a single machine.
The authors evaluated the capacity of a desktop grid to store and deliver the data needed to execute the workload and compare several general techniques for data deployment. Selecting the most scalable technique, the authors execute and evaluate five large production workloads on a 350-CPU desktop grid. The authors observed that this technique is sensitive to many parameters and propose that an ideal system should be responsible for choosing the proper decomposition of a workload. (Publisher abstract provided)