SETI@home: an experiment in public-resource computing
Communications of the ACM
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Volunteer computing is a form of distributed computing where projects attempt to accomplish some goal, using volunteered computational resources instead of paying for the resources [1]. Volunteer computing projects are being used for a wide range of computationally intensive scientific and mathematical goals, ranging from searching for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence to searching for cures to cancer and other diseases, to finding Mersenne prime numbers [1, 2, 3]. Due to the computational demands of volunteer computing projects, it is desirable to find additional sources of volunteer computing power. In order to be a viable source of volunteer computing power, a platform must be able to provide enough CPU cycles to make it worth the effort to port volunteer computing applications to that platform. Video game consoles have become increasingly powerful computers over the last 30 years, and the number of video game consoles sold and their computational power combined with their network capability makes them a potentially good platform for volunteer computing. We devise an experiment to test the potential usefulness of video game consoles for volunteer computing and compare the time it takes a video game console and several different computers to do the same amount of work for an example project.