Public distributed computing projects use resources that are insecure, heterogeneous, unreliable, sporadically available, and expensive to communicate with. It's also hard to persuade people to share their PC. But the magnitude of the resource - roughly 100 million privately-owned PCs on the Internet today - makes it tempting to try, and projects like GIMPS, distributed.net and SETI@home have demonstrated the feasibility of the approach.

We are currently developing BOINC, a software platform for public distributed computing. BOINC will support a wide range of applications, including those with large storage or communication requirements. Independent BOINC projects can share overlapping resource pools, and participants can control the sharing of their resources.