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Concept
Volunteer computing
Summary
Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop computer is sufficiently powerful to perform billions of operations a second, but for most users only between 10–15% of its capacity is used. Common tasks such as word processing or web browsing leave the computer mostly idle.
The practice of volunteer computing, which dates back to the mid-1990s, can potentially make substantial processing power available to researchers at minimal cost. Typically, a program running on a volunteer's computer periodically contacts a research application to request jobs and report results. A middleware system usually serves as an intermediary.
The first volunteer computing project was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which started in January 1996. It was followed in 1997 by distributed.net. In 1997 and 1998, several academic research projects developed Java-based systems for volunteer computing; examples include Bayanihan, Popcorn, Superweb, and Charlotte.
The term volunteer computing was coined by Luis F. G. Sarmenta, the developer of Bayanihan. It is also appealing for global efforts on social responsibility, or Corporate Social Responsibility as reported in a Harvard Business Review.
In 1999, the SETI@home and Folding@home projects were launched. These projects received considerable media coverage, and each one attracted several hundred thousand volunteers.
Between 1998 and 2002, several companies were formed with business models involving volunteer computing. Examples include Popular Power, Porivo, Entropia, and United Devices.
In 2002, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) project was founded at University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation. BOINC provides a complete middleware system for volunteer computing, including a client, client GUI, application runtime system, server software, and software implementing a project web site.
Official source
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