Distributed Execution with Remote Audit

Recently, there has been a rapidly expanding body of work with the vision of seamlessly integrating idle networked computers into virtual computing environments. This is enabled primarily by the success of research e orts promoting parallel and distributed computing on networks of workstations and the wide acceptance of Java. The proliferation of work in this area has provided new Internet-based infrastructures that harness the power of computing bases comprising hundreds of loosely-connected volunteered machines (i.e., hosts). While many of these systems have proposed the use of non-altruistic market-based schemes for promoting large-scale participation, mechanisms for ensuring that hosts participating in collaborative computing environments perform the work assigned to them have been largely ignored. This paper presents our implementation of one framework that layers a remote audit mechanism on top of an existing distributed computing model, and provides eAEcient methods for verifying, with a tunable level of certainty, whether a remote host performed the task it was assigned.