# Globally Scheduling Volunteer Computing
## 3 Science United  
In BOINC's original model, a project recruits volunteers by publicizing itself and creating web pages describing its research. Volunteers survey available projects, and attach their clients to one or more.  
The intention of this model was to create a \"free market\" in which scientists compete for computing power by promoting themselves and their research, and volunteers decide, based on their personal values and interests, which projects to support. The goal was that VC would divide computing power among scientists based on the aggregated knowledge  
Figure 1: BOINC’s account manager architecture.  
and values of the public. This was inspired by the Iowa Political Stock Market, which used an analogous approach to predicting election results, with the viewpoint that \"Markets allocate scarce resources to their most valued use\" [11].  
The free market model did not work as intended. Most volunteers \"locked in\" to a few projects and did not seek out new ones [12]. Additionally, in spite of the prospect of cheap computing power, relatively few scientists created BOINC projects. In retrospect this is understandable. In the free-market model, creating a project is risky: there's a substantial investment [13], with no guarantee of any return, since no one may volunteer. The model requires that projects publicize themselves, demanding resources and skills (media relations, web design, outreach) that are not readily available to most scientists. Volunteers demand a steady supply of jobs, and the computing needs of many research groups are sporadic.  
To address these problems, we developed a \"coordinated model\" for BOINC-based volunteer computing. The client/server technology remains the same, but the volunteer interface is new. Instead selecting projects, volunteers now select the science areas they want to support. This aligns with the motivations of most volunteers: support of science goals has been shown to be the major motivation for participation in VC [12].  
A central \"coordinator\" then assigns volunteer devices to projects; this assignment can change over time. The coordinator is called \"Science United\" [4]. New volunteers go to the Science United web site. As part of the signup process, they register their science-area preferences. They can also express preference for research locations--countries or institutions.  
The volunteer downloads the BOINC client from Science United and installs it. Science United is an account manager. When the client first runs, it connects to Science United and obtains a list of projects to attach to, based on the volunteer's preferences and other factors. This assignment can change over time; a volunteer may compute for a project that did not exist when they first registered.  
Science United maintains a set of \"vetted\" BOINC projects, and it knows the science area and geographical attributes of each project. New BOINC projects can apply to be included in this list.  
Science United's coordinated model has several advantages over the free-market model:  
* Volunteers do not need to browse projects; in fact, they need not even be aware of the existence of projects.
* Projects do not need to publicize themselves, or to operate a web site.
* Scientists can apply to Science United to have prospective BOINC projects pre-vetted. At that point they can be guaranteed a certain amount of computing throughput, depending on their science area, their location, and what types of computing devices their applications can use. Thus the risk in creating a project is reduced.
* Science United acts as a unified brand for VC. Publicity campaigns (mass media, social media, co-promotions, etc.) can refer to this brand, rather than the brands of individual projects, thus allowing more effective promotion.
* Projects with sporadic computing needs do not risk losing volunteers.