Multiparameter and index evaluation of voluntary distributed computing projects

Abstract

In 2014–2015 years the very first sociological study of Russian crunchers [20] – volunteers who provide their computing resources for solving laborious tasks was conducted by authors. The study covered almost 650 people, which is a representative sample (more than 16% of total sample of about 4000 crunchers). A detailed analysis of that survey data led the authors to the idea of developing a new approach to evaluation of VDC projects. It is based on expert assessments of project quality on many criteria such as clarity of concept and vision, sound scientific platform, as well as existence of visualized results, availability of tools for encouraging crunchers, and so on. A new tool for assessing the quality of VDC projects (the YaK-index) is proposed and described in this paper. It was applied for evaluating some VDC projects to identify their strong and weak features, to make recommendations for improving their efficiency, to enhance the attractiveness for those interested in the VDC, and to create conditions for providing comparable information to the leadership of VDC projects. This paper describes the YaK-index idea and methodology, some stages of its development. Examples of visualization of comparable results of evaluating for a number of projects are given.