Keywords: grid computing, cloud computing, desktop grids, volunteer computing.

The UnaGrid solution has been used in projects of different research areas for executing bag-of-tasks applications, showing that it can reduce the development cycle that a research project takes. However, UnaGrid has limitations in the customization level of the computational resources required by the research users and its administration is complicated for the UnaGrid support team. Additionally, UnaGrid is limited for deploying CVCs only on desktops managed through a Windows Server and it was not designed to be used in academic activities.

These problems have been addressed by innovative computing paradigms, such as cloud computing, which hides the complexities associated with most computer infrastructure, providing on-demand access to personalized computing services, high usability and accessed remotely through Internet. To obtain the UnaGrid profits and those associated with the new paradigm cloud computing, in 2009 we began to develop a new infrastructure solution called UnaCloud. UnaCloud is an innovative research effort to widely analyze the prospect of using an opportunistic underlying infrastructure to support an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing service model. This is the most important result and motivation of this research work.

The UnaCloud solution uses an opportunistic cloud computing IaaS architecture, which provides at lower cost, fundamental computing resources (processing, storage and networking) to run arbitrary software, including operating systems and applications. Unlike UnaGrid, UnaCloud allows the deployment of CVCs on desktop computers independent of administrative domain systems and it also can be used in academic activities and e-Science projects.

UnaCloud deals with the problems associated to the use of commodity, non-dedicated, distributed and heterogeneous computing resources, and it provides administration facilities. To achieve this, we proposed an IaaS architecture based on two main strategies: a virtualization strategy to allow the on demand deployment of customized execution environments and, an opportunistic strategic based on the validation and extension of DGVCS's design concepts to provide a commodity, non-dedicated, and heterogeneous underlying infrastructure.

UnaCloud represents a convergence between the cloud computing paradigm and DGVCSs. The results of the tests executed, demonstrate that UnaCloud offer promising opportunities to meet the computational requirements of multiple research groups and academic initiatives. Additionally, UnaCloud represents an attractive solution for building and deploying large-scale computing infrastructure, solving the problem of underutilization of resources and avoiding investments in dedicated hardware and their associated costs.

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