Abstract
Emerging cloud systems, such as volunteer clouds and mobile clouds, are getting momentum among the current topics that dominate the research landscape of Cloud Computing. Volunteer cloud computing is an economical, secure, and greener alternative solution to the current Cloud Computing model that is based on data centers, where tens of thousands of dedicated servers are setup to back the cloud services. This paper presents cuCloud, a Volunteer Computing as a Service (VCaaS) system that is based on the spare resources of personal computers owned by individuals and/or organizations. The paper addresses the design and implementation issues of cuCloud, including the technical details of its integration with the well-known open source IaaS cloud management system, CloudStack. The paper also presents the empirical performance evidence of cuCloud in comparison with Amazon EC2 using a big-data application based on Hadoop.