The Computational and Storage Potential of Volunteer Computing

TL;DR

This paper evaluates the capacity of volunteer computing by analyzing data from over 330,000 hosts, demonstrating its potential to support more data-intensive applications with larger memory and storage needs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of volunteer computing resources, highlighting its potential to handle more demanding applications than previously possible.

Findings

Volunteer computing can support more data-intensive applications.

Hosts have substantial processing power and storage capacity.

Volunteer computing shows high host availability and resource limits.

Abstract

"Volunteer computing" uses Internet-connected computers, volunteered by their owners, as a source of computing power and storage. This paper studies the potential capacity of volunteer computing. We analyzed measurements of over 330,000 hosts participating in a volunteer computing project. These measurements include processing power, memory, disk space, network throughput, host availability, user-specified limits on resource usage, and host churn. We show that volunteer computing can support applications that are significantly more data-intensive, or have larger memory and storage requirements, than those in current projects.