Defining volunteer computing: a formal approach

Volunteer computing resembles private desktop grids whereas desktop grids are not fully equivalent to volunteer computing. There are several attempts to distinguish and categorize them using informal and formal methods. However, most formal approaches model a particular middleware and do not focus on the general notion of volunteer or desktop grid computing. This work makes an attempt to formalize their characteristics and relationship. To this end formal modeling is applied that tries to grasp the semantic of their functionalities — as opposed to comparisons based on properties, features, etc. We apply this modeling method to formalize the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) [Anderson D. P., 2004] volunteer computing system.