Reliability Analysis in Desktop Cloud Systems

Although users of desktop clouds perceive these platforms as typical cloud infrastructure (IaaS) services, these platforms must face reliability threats not found in traditional clusters and data centers. Desktop Clouds are opportunistic platforms that offer cloud computing services using computers that people use for their daily activities. For instance, platforms such as CernVM and UnaCloud, harvest idle resources on computer labs to run clusters of virtual machines and support scientific applications. These platforms must deal with interruptions and interference caused by the users on the desktops and the applications they run. In this paper we describe diverse strategies we propose to increase the reliability in desktop cloud platforms. First, we present a reliability analysis based on extended threat propagation chains. Then, we describe mitigation strategies for the identified threats. Finally, we discuss some evaluations we performed.