Towards a formal model of volunteer computing systems

Volunteer Computing is a form of distributed computing in which the general public offers processing power and storage to scientific research projects. A large variety of Volunteer Computing Systems (VCS) have been proposed in the literature which use different architectures from client/server to P2P. This paper aims to provide a formal abstraction of VCS. At first, we identify three key roles played by VCS computing resources. Then, a formal model and related methods concerning Volunteer Computing are introduced. Relationships among elements are also characterized, based on set theory and operational reduction rules. We apply this model to describe a part of the XtremWeb protocol. Our results can help to lay a substantial foundation for the research on formalisms of Volunteer Computing.