On two kinds of public-resource distributed computing

‘Public Resource Distributed Computing’ has succeeded in grabbing the popular imagination — even to the point of becoming synonymous with the term ‘Grid’ in some press reports. Our experience is that different applications using this paradigm may have markedly different characteristics. This paper compares two such applications: SETI@home from Berkeley, and climateprediction.net, our own work. We observe that the task of distributing the former is in many ways much simpler than that for the latter, and detail some of the steps taken to make it a viable and successful activity.