Preliminary Concept Paper and Project Proposal Volunteer Computing Please Do Not Distribute without Permission

The introduction of Java by Sun Microsystems, and the recent explosive growth of interest in platform-independent executable content on the WorldWide Web , has opened exciting new possibilites in parallel computing. This paper proposes the idea of volunteer computing , which aims to allow people from anywhere in the world to volunteer their computers' processing power towards solving a large parallel problem by simply browsing a web page. Because it requires no prior human contact and very little technical knowledge from the client user, volunteer computing makes it possible to very quickly build a massively parallel computer marshalling the strength of thousands, or even millions, of computers around the world. Volunteer computing is useful in both true volunteer situations, where the volunteers come from independent administrative domains (e.g., when anybody on the Internet can volunteer), and in quasi-volunteer situations, where the volunteers all belong to the same administrative domain (e.g., within an intranet). In both cases, a volunteer computing system would allow one to forgo the clumsy and time-consuming setup procedures required by currently available network-of-workstations systems software, making it possible to build heterogenous networks-of-workstations orders-of-magnitude larger than any that have been built so far. The goal of this paper is to spur enough interest in the MIT community to embark on a research project that will produce a usable volunteer computing system. It proposes possible implementations of volunteer computing using Java, and discusses issues and problems that arise, such as motivation, applications, eeciency, security, and reliability. The potential contributions of a successful volunteer computing project, including such interesting topics as the \client-as-server" model, massive networks-of-workstations, and networks-of-information-appliances, are also discussed. Finally, a preliminary survey of related work is provided, and their possible implications on the context of this research are brieey discussed.