The home computer owner is paid a fee for processing time. Another example is Entropia, Inc., which is assisting scientists working at Scripps Research Institute by linking them to large numbers of PC users for an AIDS project. Entropia takes a portion of the accumulated processing power and sells that to firms that would normally need to rent high-powered computers. Parabon Computation of Fairfax, VA utilizes its Frontier program to distribute tasks to provider computers running their proprietary Pioneer compute engine software. Results of the computations are sent back to the Frontier server and the clients collect the results at their leisure.
Nomad research is an early customer.
Nomad found that jobs that previously took weeks to run now run in hours due to harnessing the power of multiple provider computers. The first possible vulnerability is the requirement to download proprietary software. The download must be checked for known viruses, especially Trojans and worms. A second major security vulnerability in this type of implementation is allowing third parties access to proprietary information. Once the data is sent from the server the owner of the data no longer has control over that information.