“Volunteer computing”的意思、由来-开放百科全书

Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing, "an arrangement in which people, so-called volunteers, provide computing resources to projects, which use the resources to do distributed computing and/or storage".^[1] Thus, computer owners or users donate their computing resources (such as processing power and storage) to one or more "projects".

Volunteers are frequently members of the general public in the possession of their own personal computers with an Internet connection, but also organizations can act as volunteers and provide their computing resources.

History

The first volunteer computing project was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which was started in January 1996.^[2] It was followed in 1997 by distributed.net. In 1997 and 1998, several academic research projects developed Java-based systems for volunteer computing; examples include Bayanihan,^[3] Popcorn,^[4] Superweb,^[5] and Charlotte.^[6]

The term volunteer computing was coined by Luis F. G. Sarmenta, the developer of Bayanihan. It is also appealing for global efforts on social responsibility, or Corporate Social Responsibility as reported in a Harvard Business Review^[7] or used in the Responsible IT forum.^[8]

In 1999, the SETI@home and Folding@home projects were launched. These projects received considerable media coverage, and each one attracted several hundred thousand volunteers.

Between 1998 and 2002, several companies were formed with business models involving volunteer computing. Examples include Popular Power, Porivo, Entropia, and United Devices.

In 2002, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) project was founded at University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, funded by the National Science Foundation. BOINC provides a complete middleware system for volunteer computing, including a client, client GUI, application runtime system, server software, and software implementing a project web site. The first project based on BOINC was Predictor@home, based at the Scripps Research Institute, which began operation in 2004. Soon thereafter, SETI@home and ClimatePrediction.net began using BOINC. A number of new BOINC-based projects were created over the next few years, including Rosetta@home, Einstein@home, and AQUA@home. In 2007, IBM World Community Grid switched from the United Devices platform to BOINC.^[9]

Middleware

The client software of the early volunteer computing projects consisted of a single program that combined the scientific computation and the distributed computing infrastructure. This monolithic architecture was inflexible. For example, it was difficult to deploy new application versions.

More recently, volunteer computing has moved to middleware systems that provide a distributed computing infrastructure independent from the scientific computation. Examples include:

Most of these systems have the same basic structure: a client program runs on the volunteer's computer. It periodically contacts project-operated servers over the Internet, requesting jobs and reporting the results of completed jobs. This "pull" model is necessary because many volunteer computers are behind firewalls that do not allow incoming connections. The system keeps track of each user's "credit", a numerical measure of how much work that user's computers have done for the project.

Volunteer computing systems must deal with several issues involving volunteered computers: their heterogeneity, their churn (the tendency of individual computers to join and leave the network over time), their sporadic availability, and the need to not interfere with their performance during regular use.

In addition, volunteer computing systems must deal with problems related to correctness:

One common approach to these problems is replicated computing, in which each job is performed on at least two computers. The results (and the corresponding credit) are accepted only if they agree sufficiently.

Drawbacks for participants

These effects may or may not be noticeable, and even if they are noticeable, the volunteer might choose to continue participating. However, the increased power consumption can be remedied to some extent by setting an option to limit the percentage of the processor used by the client, which is available in some client software.

Benefits for participants

Importance

Although there are issues such as lack of accountability and trust between participants and researchers while implementing the projects, volunteer computing is crucially important, especially to projects that have limited funding.{{Citation needed|date=November 2017}}

See also

References

1. ^¹²{{cite web|url=https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/VolunteerComputing|title=VolunteerComputing – BOINC|author=|date=|website=boinc.Berkeley.edu|access-date=November 18, 2017}}
2. ^{{cite web |url=http://mersenne.org/various/history.php |title=GIMPS History |publisher=Great Internet Mersenne Primes Search |work=Mersenne.org |access-date=December 29, 2013}}
3. ^{{cite book |author=Sarmenta, L.F.G. |title=Worldwide Computing and Its Applications — WWCA'98: Second International Conference Tsukuba, Japan, March 4–5, 1998 Proceedings |chapter=Bayanihan: Web-Based Volunteer Computing Using Java |volume=1368 |chapterurl=https://books.google.com/books?id=YE7KNkcTt1cC&pg=PA444 |series=Lecture Notes in Computer Science |year=1998 |pages=444–461 |publisher=Springer Berlin Heidelberg |doi=10.1007/3-540-64216-1_67|isbn=978-3-540-64216-9 |citeseerx=10.1.1.37.6643 }} {{nowrap|• {{ISBN|978-3-540-64216-9}}}} (print) {{nowrap|• {{ISBN|978-3-540-69704-6}}}} (online)
4. ^{{cite conference |author1 = O Regev|author2 = Noam Nisan|authorlink2 = Noam Nisan|title = The POPCORN market—an online market for computational resources|booktitle = Proceedings of the first international conference on Information and computation economies (in Charleston, South Carolina)|date = October 28, 1998|chapterurl = http://gemini.econ.umd.edu/jrust/papers/popcorn.pdf|url = http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=289027|publisher = ACM Press|place = New York, NY|pages = 148–157|doi = 10.1145/288994.289027|isbn = 1-58113-076-7}}
5. ^{{cite conference |last=Alexandrov |first=A.D. |last2=Ibel |first2=M. |last3=Schauser |first3=K.E. |last4=Scheiman |first4=K.E. |title=SuperWeb: Research issues in Java-Based Global Computing |booktitle=Proceedings of the Workshop on Java for High performance Scientific and Engineering Computing Simulation and Modelling |publisher=Syracuse University |location=New York |year=1996}}
6. ^{{cite conference |last=Baratloo |first=A. |last2=Karaul |first2=M. |last3=Kedem |first3=Z. |last4=Wyckoff |first4=P. |title=Charlotte: Metacomputing on the Web |booktitle=Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing Systems |date=September 1996 |url=http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/article/baratloo96charlotte.html |registration=yes}}
7. ^{{cite web |url=http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/email/pdfs/Porter_Dec_2006.pdf |title=The Link Between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility |author1=Michael Porter |author2=Mark Kramer |publisher=Harvard Business Review |archiveurl=https://www.webcitation.org/5QJgO0oSz?url=http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/email/pdfs/Porter_Dec_2006.pdf |archivedate=July 14, 2007 |access-date=August 25, 2007 |dead-url=no |df=mdy-all }}
8. ^{{cite web |url=http://www.responsI.tk |title=ResponsI.TK |publisher=Responsible IT forum}}
9. ^{{cite newsgroup |url=http://worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread?thread=15715 |title=BOINC Migration Announcement |date=Aug 17, 2007 |access-date=December 29, 2013}}
10. ^{{cite web |url=http://techreport.com/articles.x/4341/1 |title=Measuring Folding@Home's performance impact |author=Geoff Gasior |date=November 11, 2002 |accessdate=December 29, 2013}}
11. ^http://mescal.imag.fr/membres/derrick.kondo/pubs/kondo_hcw09.pdf