Volunteer computing

Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which computer owners donate their computing resources (such as processing power and storage) to one or more "projects".

History

The first volunteer computing project was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which was started in January 1996.[1] 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,[2] Popcorn,[3] Superweb,[4] and Charlotte.[5]

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[6] or used in the Responsible IT forum.[7]

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. The first project based on BOINC was Predictor@home, based at the Scripps Research Institute, which began operation in 2004. Soon thereafter, SETI@home and ClimatePrediction.net began using BOINC. A number of new BOINC-based projects were created over the next few years, including Rosetta@home, Einstein@home, and AQUA@home. In 2007, IBM World Community Grid switched from the United Devices platform to BOINC.[8]

Middleware for volunteer computing

The client software of the early volunteer computing projects consisted of a single program that combined the scientific computation and the distributed computing infrastructure. This monolithic architecture was inflexible. For example, it was difficult to deploy new application versions.

More recently, volunteer computing has moved to middleware systems that provide a distributed computing infrastructure independent from the scientific computation. Examples include:

Most of these systems have the same basic structure: a client program runs on the volunteer's computer. It periodically contacts project-operated servers over the Internet, requesting jobs and reporting the results of completed jobs. This "pull" model is necessary because many volunteer computers are behind firewalls that do not allow incoming connections. The system keeps track of each user's "credit", a numerical measure of how much work that user's computers have done for the project.

Volunteer computing systems must deal with several issues involving volunteered computers: their heterogeneity, their churn (the tendency of individual computers to join and leave the network over time), their sporadic availability, and the need to not interfere with their performance during regular use.

In addition, volunteer computing systems must deal with problems related to correctness:

One common approach to these problems is replicated computing, in which each job is performed on at least two computers. The results (and the corresponding credit) are accepted only if they agree sufficiently.

Drawbacks for participants

These effects may or may not be noticeable, and even if they are noticeable, the volunteer might choose to continue participating. However, the increased power consumption can be remedied to some extent by setting an option to limit the percentage of the processor used by the client, which is available in some client software.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "GIMPS History". Mersenne.org. Great Internet Mersenne Primes Search. Retrieved December 29, 2013.
  2. ↑ Sarmenta, L.F.G. (1998). "Bayanihan: Web-Based Volunteer Computing Using Java". Worldwide Computing and Its Applications — WWCA'98: Second International Conference Tsukuba, Japan, March 4–5, 1998 Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1368. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 444–461. doi:10.1007/3-540-64216-1_67. • ISBN 978-3-540-64216-9 (print) • ISBN 978-3-540-69704-6 (online)
  3. ↑ O Regev; Noam Nisan (October 28, 1998). "The POPCORN market—an online market for computational resources". Proceedings of the first international conference on Information and computation economies (in Charleston, South Carolina). New York, NY: ACM Press. pp. 148–157. doi:10.1145/288994.289027. ISBN 1-58113-076-7.
  4. ↑ Alexandrov, A.D.; Ibel, M.; Schauser, K.E.; Scheiman, K.E. (1996). "SuperWeb: Research issues in Java-Based Global Computing". Proceedings of the Workshop on Java for High performance Scientific and Engineering Computing Simulation and Modelling. New York: Syracuse University.
  5. ↑ Baratloo, A.; Karaul, M.; Kedem, Z.; Wyckoff, P. (September 1996). "Charlotte: Metacomputing on the Web". Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems. (registration required (help)).
  6. ↑ Michael Porter; Mark Kramer. "The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility". Harvard Business Review. Archived from the original (PDF) on July 14, 2007.
  7. ↑ "ResponsI.TK". Responsible IT forum.
  8. ↑ "BOINC Migration Announcement". Aug 17, 2007. Retrieved December 29, 2013.
  9. ↑ Geoff Gasior (November 11, 2002). "Measuring Folding@Home's performance impact". Retrieved December 29, 2013.

External links

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