The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced rhymes with "oink") is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software program that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to imple ...

system for

volunteer computing Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop ...

(a type of

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

). Developed originally to support

SETI@home SETI@home ("SETI at home") is a project of the Berkeley SETI Research Center to analyze radio signals with the aim of Search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Until March 2020, it was run ...

, it became the platform for many other applications in areas as diverse as

medicine Medicine is the science and Praxis (process), practice of caring for patients, managing the Medical diagnosis, diagnosis, prognosis, Preventive medicine, prevention, therapy, treatment, Palliative care, palliation of their injury or disease, ...

molecular biology Molecular biology is a branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecule, molecular basis of biological activity in and between Cell (biology), cells, including biomolecule, biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactio ...

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

climatology Climatology (from Greek , ''klima'', "slope"; and , '' -logia'') or climate science is the scientific study of Earth's climate, typically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period of at least 30 years. Climate concerns the atmospher ...

, environmental science, and

astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline, James Keeler, said, astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the ...

, among others. The purpose of BOINC is to enable researchers to utilize processing resources of

personal computer A personal computer, commonly referred to as PC or computer, is a computer designed for individual use. It is typically used for tasks such as Word processor, word processing, web browser, internet browsing, email, multimedia playback, and PC ...

s and other devices around the world. BOINC development began with a group based at the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, and led by David P. Anderson, who also led SETI@home. As a high-performance volunteer computing platform, BOINC brings together 34,236 active participants employing 136,341 active computers (hosts) worldwide, processing daily on average 20.164

PetaFLOPS Floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance in computing, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate measu ...

(it would be the 21st largest processing capability in the world compared with an individual

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

). The

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

(NSF) funds BOINC through awards SCI/0221529, SCI/0438443 and SCI/0721124. ''

Guinness World Records ''Guinness World Records'', known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as ''The Guinness Book of Records'' and in previous United States editions as ''The Guinness Book of World Records'', is a British reference book published annually, list ...

'' ranks BOINC as the largest computing grid in the world. BOINC

code In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communicati ...

runs on various

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

s, including

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, Android,

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, and

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free-software Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable ...

. BOINC is

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

released under the terms of the

GNU Lesser General Public License The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own ...

(LGPL).

History

BOINC was originally developed to manage the

project. David P. Anderson has said that he chose its name because he wanted something that was not "imposing", but rather "light, catchy, and maybe - like '

Unix Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

' - a little

risqué Risqué may refer to: * Material deemed slightly indecent or liable to shock, especially sexual suggestiveness * ''Risqué'' (album), 1979 recording by American disco band Chic * Risque (comics), mutant character first appearing in Marvel Comic ...

", so he "played around with various acronyms and settled on 'BOINC'".The Name and Logo
by David P. Anderson, at Continuum-Hypothesis.com; published January 15, 2022; retrieved June 5, 2024 The original SETI client was a non-BOINC software exclusively for SETI@home. It was one of the first

projects, and not designed with a high level of security. As a result, some participants in the project attempted to cheat the project to gain "credits", while others submitted entirely falsified work. BOINC was designed, in part, to combat these security breaches. The BOINC project started in February 2002, and its first version was released on April 10, 2002. The first BOINC-based project was Predictor@home, launched on June 9, 2004. In 2009, AQUA@home deployed multi-threaded CPU applications for the first time, followed by the first

OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a software framework, framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous computing, heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), di ...

application in 2010. As of 15 August 2022, there are 33 projects on the official list. There are also, however, BOINC projects not included on the official list. Each year, an international BOINC Workshop is hosted to increase collaboration among project administrators. In 2021, the workshop was hosted virtually. While not affiliated with BOINC officially, there have been several independent projects that reward BOINC users for their participation, including Charity Engine (sweepstakes based on processing power with prizes funded by private entities who purchase computational time of CE users), Bitcoin Utopia (now defunct), and Gridcoin (a blockchain which mints coins based on processing power).

Design and structure

BOINC is

software Software consists of computer programs that instruct the Execution (computing), execution of a computer. Software also includes design documents and specifications. The history of software is closely tied to the development of digital comput ...

that can exploit the unused CPU and GPU cycles on

computer hardware Computer hardware includes the physical parts of a computer, such as the central processing unit (CPU), random-access memory (RAM), motherboard, computer data storage, graphics card, sound card, and computer case. It includes external devices ...

to perform scientific computing. In 2008, BOINC's website announced that

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

had developed a language called

CUDA In computing, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated gene ...

that uses GPUs for scientific computing. With NVIDIA's assistance, several BOINC-based projects (e.g., MilkyWay@home.

) developed applications that run on NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA. BOINC added support for the ATI/

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

family of GPUs in October 2009. The GPU applications run from 2 to 10 times faster than the former CPU-only versions. GPU support (via

) was added for computers using

with AMD Radeon graphic cards, with the current BOINC client supporting OpenCL on Windows, Linux, and macOS. GPU support is also provided for

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

GPUs. BOINC consists of a server system and

client software is a computer that gets information from another computer called server in the context of client–server model of computer networks. The server is often (but not always) on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service ...

that communicate to process and distribute work units and return results.

Mobile application

A BOINC app also exists for Android, allowing every person owning an Android device – smartphone, tablet and/or Kindle – to share their unused computing power. The user is allowed to select the research projects they want to support, if it is in the app's available project list. By default, the application will allow computing only when the device is connected to a WiFi network, is being charged, and the battery has a charge of at least 90%. Some of these settings can be changed to users needs. Not all BOINC projects are available and some of the projects are not compatible with all versions of Android operating system or availability of work is intermittent. Currently available projects are Asteroids@home,

Einstein@Home Einstein@Home is a volunteer computing project that searches for signals from spinning neutron stars in data from gravitational-wave detectors, from large radio telescopes, and from a gamma-ray telescope. Neutron stars are detected by their puls ...

, LHC@home, Moo! Wrapper, Rosetta@home, World Community Grid and . As of September 2021, the most recent version of the mobile application can only be downloaded from the BOINC website or the F-Droid repository as the official Google Play store does not allow downloading and running executables not signed by the app developer and each BOINC project has their own executable files.

User interfaces

BOINC can be controlled remotely by

remote procedure call In distributed computing, a remote procedure call (RPC) is when a computer program causes a procedure (subroutine) to execute in a different address space (commonly on another computer on a shared computer network), which is written as if it were a ...

s (RPC), from the

command line A command-line interface (CLI) is a means of interacting with software via command (computing), commands each formatted as a line of text. Command-line interfaces emerged in the mid-1960s, on computer terminals, as an interactive and more user ...

, and from a BOINC Manager. BOINC Manager currently has two "views": the ''Advanced View'' and the ''Simplified GUI''. The ''Grid View'' was removed in the 6.6.x clients as it was redundant. The appearance (

skin Skin is the layer of usually soft, flexible outer tissue covering the body of a vertebrate animal, with three main functions: protection, regulation, and sensation. Other animal coverings, such as the arthropod exoskeleton, have different ...

) of the Simplified GUI is user-customizable, in that users can create their own designs.

Account managers

A BOINC Account Manager is an application that manages multiple BOINC project accounts across multiple computers (CPUs) and operating systems. Account managers were designed for people who are new to BOINC or have several computers participating in several projects. The account manager concept was conceived and developed jointly by GridRepublic and BOINC. Current and past account managers include: * BAM! (BOINC Account Manager) (The first publicly available Account Manager, released for public use on May 30, 2006) * GridRepublic (Follows the ideas of simplicity and neatness in account management) * Charity Engine (Non-profit account manager for hire, uses prize draws and continuous charity fundraising to motivate people to join the grid) * Science United (An account manager designed to make BOINC easier to use which automatically selects vetted BOINC projects for users based on desired research areas such as "medicine" or "physics") * Dazzler (Open-source Account Manager, to ease institutional management resources)

Credit system

* The BOINC Credit System is designed to avoid bad hardware and cheating by validating results before granting credit. * The credit management system helps to ensure that users are returning results which are both statistically and scientifically accurate. * Online volunteer computing is a complicated and variable mix of long-term users, retiring users and new users with different personal aspirations.

Projects

BOINC is used by many groups and individuals. Some BOINC projects are based at universities and research labs while others are independent areas of research or interest.

Active

Completed

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing Volunteer computing 2002 software Free science software Cross-platform free software Free and open-source Android software Science software for macOS Science software for Linux Science software for Windows Software that uses wxWidgets