Talk:List of volunteer computing projects

Peak versus current for both the "Active Processing Units" and "Performance in TeraFLOPS" coulmns?
I was wondering if perhaps those columns should be broken out into two columns each -- peak and current numbers -- since involvement in some projects may start to decline (or at least dip). For the table of projects that are now inactive, perhaps columns showing their figures at their peaks would be of historical interest, as well? &mdash;Undomelin (talk) 01:02, 14 February 2018 (UTC)

Suggest moving page to List_of_volunteer_computing_projects
Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. 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. Typical uses like basic 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. A middleware system usually serves as an intermediary.

Al Piskun (talk) 19:46, 27 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Done. Post-move cleanup complete Al Piskun (talk) 14:59, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

about non-research crowdsourced computing
with recent development of AI, there's some new crowdsourced computing projects, for e.g.: AIhorde https://aihorde.net/ for Stable Diffusion, Petals https://petals.dev/ for large language models. Those project are for users not researchers, should they be included in this list and should “Volunteer computing” be modified to include non-research as well ? PhineasPta (talk) 10:24, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

Parabon Computation Inc.
Compute Against Cancer was powered by Parabon Computation Inc, using the Frontier Compute Engine. Started in the year 2000? More research needs to be done and should be added to list. You can find discussion of Parabon on the forums of World Community Grid ~2008 Danwat1234 thesecond (talk) 10:28, 7 January 2024 (UTC)