Searching for High-Value Rare Events with Uncheatable Grid Computing

High-value rare-event searching is arguably the most natural application of grid computing, where computational tasks are distributed to a large collection of clients (which comprise the computation grid) in such a way that clients are rewarded for performing tasks assigned to them. Although natural, rare-event searching presents significant challenges for a computation supervisor, who partitions and distributes the search space out to clients while contending with “lazy” clients, who don’t do all their tasks, and “hoarding” clients, who don’t report rare events back to the supervisor. We provide schemes, based on a technique we call chaff injection, for efficiently performing uncheatable grid computing in the context of searching for high-value rare events in the presence of coalitions of lazy and hoarding clients.