Between 1998 and 2002, several companies were formed with business models involving volunteer computing.

In addition, volunteer computing systems must deal with problems related to correctness:

Drugdiscovery@home Early in silico drug discovery by volunteer computing.

Africa@home is a website for volunteer computing projects which allow your computer to contribute to African humanitarian causes.

Volunteer computing systems must deal with several problematic aspects of the volunteered computers:

If the volunteer computing application attempts to run while the computer is in use, it may impact performance of the PC.

The GridRepublic philosophy is to keep everything clean and simple to encourage general public participation in volunteer computing.

The custom installer simplifies and reduces the steps required to join in volunteer computing.

It's done wonders to demonstrate the viability of distributed computing efforts and volunteer computing.

As with most other volunteer computing projects, progress relies on recruiting a number of users willing to donate computing power to the project.

This can facilitate commercial transactions, as in utility computing, or make it easier to assemble volunteer computing networks.

BOINC is designed to be a free structure for anyone wishing to start a volunteer computing project.

SETI@home, an internet-based public volunteer computing project.

More recently, volunteer computing has moved to middleware systems that provide a distributed computing infrastructure independently of the scientific computation.

For the first 6 years of its history it operated several different volunteer computing projects that allowed members to donate their spare computer cycles to worthwhile causes.

The client software of the early volunteer computing projects consisted of a single program that combined the scientific computation and the distributed computing infrastructure.

However, larger scale volunteer computing systems such as BOINC-based systems have had more followers.

However, basic grid and cloud computing approaches that rely on volunteer computing can not handle traditional supercomputing tasks such as fluid dynamic simulations.

The first volunteer computing project was the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, which was started in January 1996.

Fast and Scalable Simulation of Volunteer Computing Systems Using SimGrid.

In 2002 he created the BOINC software, which develops an open-source software platform for volunteer computing.

Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which computer owners donate their computing resources (such as processing power and storage) to one or more "projects".

The term "volunteer computing" was coined by Luis F. G. Sarmenta, the developer of Bayanihan.

The mission of GridRepublic is to raise public awareness and participation in volunteer computing with BOINC.

Projects include Africa@home, a volunteer computing initiative involving CERN and academic institutions from Europe and Africa.