Desktop grids and volunteer computing systems (DGVCS's) utilize the free resources available in Intranet or Internet environments for supporting large-scale computation and storage. For over a decade, DGVCS's have been one of the largest and most powerful distributed computing systems in the world, offering a high return on investment for applications from a wide range of scientific domains (including computational biology, climate prediction, and high-energy physics).

Recently, the FOLDING@home project broke the PetaFLOPS barrier with 41,145 Sony PS3 participants. While DGVCS's sustain up to PetaFLOPS of computing power from hundreds of thousands to millions of resources, fully leveraging the platform's computational power is still a major challenge because of the immense scale, high volatility, and extreme heterogeneity of such systems.

The purpose of this special issue is to focus on recent advances in the development of scalable, fault-tolerant, and secure DGVCS's.

As such, the editors invite submissions on DGVCS topics including (but not limited to) the following:

• DGVCS middleware and software infrastructure (including management), with emphasis on virtual machines
• incorporation of DGVCS's with Grid infrastructures
• DGVCS programming environments and models
• modeling, simulation, and emulation of large-scale, volatile environments
• resource management and scheduling
• resource measurement and characterization
• novel DGVCS applications
• data management (strategies, protocols, storage)
• security on DGVCS's (reputation systems, result verification)
• fault-tolerance on shared, volatile resources

Submission guidelines can be found at http://www.springer.com/computer/communications/journal/10723