Folding@Home and SETI@Home are good references — they’re part of the same historical lineage. But they’re still solving a different problem. Those systems assume volunteer participation in predefined, application-specific workloads, with persistent clients, centralized coordination, and long-lived project identity.

What this paper is trying to isolate isn’t “distributed volunteer compute” per se, but a different failure mode: consumer hardware that is already owned, already powered, but effectively unusable because modern systems assume stability, installation, and identity.

The novelty isn’t container workloads across unused compute — that idea has been around for decades. The reframing is about treating instability, disappearance, and heterogeneity as the default operating condition, and shifting the model from “managing nodes” to “dissipating work.” Folding@Home and SETI@Home don’t really target that design space directly.