Volunteer computing: requirements, challenges, and solutions

Volunteer computing is a form of network based distributed computing, which allows public participants to share their idle computing resources, and helps run computationally expensive projects. Many existing volunteer computing platforms consist of millions of users, providing huge amount of memory and processing. Since the rapid growth in the volunteer computing projects, more researchers have been attracted to study and improve the existing volunteer computing system. However, the progress of concurrently running projects has slowed down due to the increasing competition of volunteers. Moreover, because of high computational needs and low participation rate of volunteers, attracting more volunteers and using their resources more efficiently have become extremely important, if volunteer computing is to remain a feasible method. In order to competently use the huge number of volunteered resources, workers' analysis and efficient task retrieval policies are important. The purpose of this paper is to assess the strengths and requirements of current volunteer computing platforms. The paper analyses different issues relating to volunteer computing such as analysis of workers, the effectiveness of workers, how their communication and computation can be modeled and how the effectiveness of task distribution and results verification policies are analyzed. At the end, some research directions in the form of partial results, and their intermediate verification have been shown, which may improve the performance of the overall system. Moreover, this survey will enable the research community to study the available schemes used in volunteer computing and help them fill gaps in existing research.