Preface to the special issue on volunteer computing and desktop grids

Desktop grids and volunteer computing systems (DGVCS’s) utilize the free resources available in Intranet or Internet environments for supporting large-scale computation and storage. For over a decade, DGVCS’s have been one of the largest and most powerful distributed computing systems in the world, offering a high return on investment for applications from a wide range of scientific domains (including computational biology, climate prediction, and high-energy physics). While DGVCS’s sustain up to PetaFLOPS of computing power from hundreds of thousands to millions of resources, fully leveraging the platform’s computational power is still a major challenge because of the immense scale, high volatility, and extreme heterogeneity of such systems.