Building a Volunteer Cloud

1. Volunteer Computing and BOINC Volunteer computing provides today many teraflops of contributed processor power to a wide range of scientific and technical projects. The first example of a large volunteer computing system was SETI@home [1], at the Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. This attracted so much volunteer interest and CPU power that its inventors, led by David Anderson, went on to develop open source middleware (the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing: BOINC [2]) which enables hundreds of institutes or individual researchers to access large amounts of computing power otherwise unavailable to them.