BOINC

SciLINC will use the BOINC framework to distribute the work to volunteer's machines. A very good resource describing BOINC can be found on the Papers related to BOINC web page. Especially:

BOINC: A System for Public-Resource Computing and Storage. David P. Anderson.5th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing, November 8, 2004, Pittsburgh, USA.

BOINC implements Public-Resource Computing. This differs from Grid-Computing in terms of security and available network bandwidth. To make efficient use of PRC the compute time of the client must be relatively large compared to the data-transfer time required.

A research scientist can create and operate a large PRC project with about a week of initial time investment and approximately an hour per week of maintenance.

"On a particular computer, the CPU might work for one project while the network is transferring files for another."

It seems to me that this is where a large bandwidth/computation project might still succeed. If the CPU is working for a computationally intensive project and the network pipe is transfering data for the data-intensive application. This would work best given a large D/L to U/L ratio, given that most consumer internet providers offer a much large pipe downstream than upstream.

(The typical server platform is LAMP with Python.)