Volunteer computing

[2] The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop computer is sufficiently powerful to perform billions of operations a second, but for most users only between 10–15% of its capacity is used.

Common tasks such as word processing or web browsing leave the computer mostly idle.

The practice of volunteer computing, which dates back to the mid-1990s, can potentially make substantial processing power available to researchers at minimal cost.

Typically, a program running on a volunteer's computer periodically contacts a research application to request jobs and report results.

[3] The first volunteer computing project was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which started in January 1996.

In 1997 and 1998, several academic research projects developed Java-based systems for volunteer computing; examples include Bayanihan,[5] Popcorn,[6] Superweb,[7] and Charlotte.

These projects received considerable media coverage, and each one attracted several hundred thousand volunteers.

Examples include: Most of these systems have the same basic structure: a client program runs on the volunteer's computer.