Introduction

Volunteer computing is an established technology that enables ordinary citizens around the globe to contribute to important challenges in fundamental science and medicine, by providing idle time on their PCs and even partaking in data analysis via the Internet. For scientists, volunteer computing represents a free and essentially unlimited computing resource. Over 100 volunteer computing projects are running already in a wide variety of scientific domains, and several million volunteers have contributed over the last 10 years. However, so far almost all these projects have been launched by scientists in North America and Europe.