Understanding and modelling resources of Internet end hosts is essential for
the design of desktop software and Internet-distributed applications. In this
paper we develop a correlated resource model of Internet end hosts based on
real trace data taken from the SETI@home project. This data covers a 5-year
period with statistics for 2.7 million hosts. The resource model is based on
statistical analysis of host computational power, memory, and storage as well
as how these resources change over time and the correlations between them. We
find that resources with few discrete values (core count, memory) are well
modeled by exponential laws governing the change of relative resource
quantities over time. Resources with a continuous range of values are well
modeled with either correlated normal distributions (processor speed for
integer operations and floating point operations) or log-normal distributions
(available disk space). We validate and show the utility of the models by
applying them to a resource allocation problem for Internet-distributed
applications, and demonstrate their value over other models. We also make our
trace data and tool for automatically generating realistic Internet end hosts
publicly available