Simulating and optimizing resource allocation in a micro-blogging application

In Volunteer Computing resources are provided by the own users, instead of by a single institution. One of its drawbacks is the unreliability of the provided resources, so their selection becomes a main point. In this paper we deal with the suitable selection of resources considering this kind of Volunteer Computing system. As the resources choice may be needed in a reduced amount of time, we cannot make use of the most powerful optimization algorithms in literature due to the time that they need to provide a solution. Instead, we propose a simple heuristic yet capable of obtaining quality results in an extremely fast way. This heuristic uses a weight system to determine each resource quality and a biased random procedure to select them accordingly. In order to tune and test it, a simulation environment of a real micro-blogging application has been developed, so that we can obtain reliable results.