Abstract
Volunteer computing (VC) is a strong way to harness distributed computing resources to perform large-scale scientific tasks. Its success directly depends on the number of participants, PC (some other devices) and time of their work. And while the computational aspect received much effective research attention and solutions; the social problem of VC phenomenon – how persuade the owners of widely dispersed smart machines and devices to participate in VC projects, and how figure out ways to speed and expand the capability of donated computer resources, remains largely unexplored. We think that a motive of self-actualization of participants of volunteer computing is not enough to explain why millions of unskilled people day by day participate in scientific computation. Our research indicates that the answer lies at the intersection of self-oriented motivation and the interactional, organizational possibilities emerging through the Internet. In this paper we investigate Russian community of VC and discuss the suggestion that online collaboration can capture people`s motivation better than only intrinsic motives.
Highlights
The complexity of the tasks facing modern science is accompanied by the complexity of the computations
The principal technical background of Volunteer computing (VC) is the idea of David Gedye [4], one of the founder of the project SETI@home (“Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”), to use dispersed desktops for computing large-scale scientific tasks [5], the software decision to integrate a lot of personal computers of Internet users in a virtual network on a special platform
In the study we investigate the Russian VC-community at the soft platform BOINC;
Summary
One of the forms of the distributed computing is the volunteer computing (VC), a specific form of online activity of volunteers, ordinary Internet users, who have no any relation to scientific or professional computer activities, and who do not receive compensation for their participation. We use the notion of volunteer computing as a type of a distributed computing in which unskilled computer owners can donate their spare computer resources to perform a computation of one or more large-scale research projects. Unlike peer-to-peer (P2P) or grid computing, VC relies on the client-server architecture.
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