BOINC vs Commercial Cloud Computing

Research papers

• The cost of virtualization implementation in volunteer computing
• Increasing GP Computing Power for Free via Desktop GRID Computing and Virtualization
• [PDF] Cost-Benefit Analysis of Cloud Computing versus Desktop Grids

Research TL;DR: (Note - 7 year old statistics!)

• In the best-case scenario, hosts register at a rate of 124 cloud nodes per day.
• The ratio of volunteer nodes needed to achieve the compute power of a small EC2 instance is about 2.83 active volunteer hosts to 1.
• Effectively, with a commercial BOINC project, there exists the opportunity to create a cloud computing service without actually owning/providing the computing capabilities yourself. Imagine creating Azure at a fraction of the cost..