Sporadic Applications

BOINC was originally designed as a batch processing system: you submit jobs, they run (independently of one another) and eventually they finish. Some potential uses of volunteer computing don't fit this model. They may require that their apps run simultaneously, and perhaps that they communicate directly with each other. Examples include MPI-type parallel apps and distributed machine learning. BOINC's 'sporadic application' mechanism is designed to support these types of systems, and to allow them to coexist with batch processing.

The sporadic app mechanism assumes that there is another distributed system - a 'guest system' - that exists outside of BOINC. The guest system typically has its own server that handles and dispatches requests. Its worker nodes may communicate directly with each other - peer-to-peer - as well as with the server.