Personal Volunteer Computing

TL;DR

This paper introduces personal volunteer computing, a new paradigm leveraging personal devices like smartphones and laptops for computational tasks, offering a cost-effective alternative to traditional hardware investments.

Contribution

It presents the concept of personal volunteer computing, demonstrating its feasibility and competitiveness with high-end laptops, and suggests future research directions.

Findings

Personal devices are competitive with high-end laptops from two years ago.

The paradigm requires no additional hardware investment.

Simple tools can enable effective personal volunteer computing.

Abstract

We propose personal volunteer computing, a novel paradigm to encourage technical solutions that leverage personal devices, such as smartphones and laptops, for personal applications that require significant computations, such as animation rendering and image processing. The paradigm requires no investment in additional hardware, relying instead on devices that are already owned by users and their community, and favours simple tools that can be implemented part-time by a single developer. We show that samples of personal devices of today are competitive with a top-of-the-line laptop from two years ago. We also propose new directions to extend the paradigm.