Volunteer computing

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

The first volunteer computing project was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which was 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 or used in the Responsible IT forum.

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.

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