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ARC Compute Element is becoming more popular in WLCG and EGI infrastructures, being used not only in the Grid context, but also as an interface to HPC and Cloud resources. It strongly relies on community contributions, which helps keeping up with the changes in the distributed computing landscape. Future ARC plans are closely linked to the needs of the LHC computing, whichever shape it may take. There are also numerous examples of ARC usage for smaller research communities through national computing infrastructure projects in different countries. As such, ARC is a viable solution for building uniform distributed computing infrastructures using a variety of resources.

Volunteer computing resembles private desktop grids whereas desktop grids are not fully equivalent to volunteer computing. There are several attempts to distinguish and categorize them using informal and formal methods. However, most formal approaches model a particular middleware and do not focus on the general notion of volunteer or desktop grid computing. This work makes an attempt to formalize their characteristics and relationship. To this end formal modeling is applied that tries to grasp the semantic of their functionalities — as opposed to comparisons based on properties, features, etc. We apply this modeling method to formalize the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) [Anderson D. P., 2004] volunteer computing system.

The decomposition algorithms provide approaches to deal with NP-hardness in solving discrete optimization problems (DOPs). In this article one of the promising ways to exploit sparse matrices — local elimination algorithm in parallel interpretation (LEAP) are demonstrated. That is a graph-based structural decomposition algorithm, which allows to compute a solution in stages such that each of them uses results from previous stages. At the same time LEAP heavily depends on elimination ordering which actually provides solving stages. Also paper considers tree- and block-parallel for LEAP and required realization process of it comparison of a several heuristics for obtaining a better elimination order and shows how is related graph structure, elimination ordering and solving time.

The article analyses the activity statistics of the Russian participants of volunteer computing (VC) using platform BOINC obtained by the authors. The data has been received with API BOINC and site www.boincstats.com. The script for the database was written in PHP, for data storing was used MySQL.

The database indicators were accumulated across all Russian projects, which allowed the calculation of the indicators characterizing the behavior of the Russian participants in all projects and teams BOINC — absolute and relative number of Russian participants, their activity, the number of introduced points system, the number of participants in each of the Russian project participants, interest in the concept of the VC.

It is shown that the position of Russia in the countries ranking is very low and is retained at the same level for 4 years. According to the authors, low activity of the Russian participants of the VC, due to individualism and the closure of Russian Internet users, as well as to a small interest in the development of fundamental science, scientific research. This, possibly due to the low-prestige as a science as a whole, as well as civil science, crowdsourcing, in particular. And, therefore, we can see insufficient dissemination of the ideas of using the mechanism of VC for research projects.