Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

BOINC
Developer(s) University of California, Berkeley
Stable release

7.4.36 Mac OS X 12 December 2014

7.4.36 Windows 1 January 2015

7.2.42 Linux 28 February 2014

7.4.41 Android

22 January 2015
Preview release

7.4.42 Windows 10 March 2015

7.4.42 Mac OS X 12 March 2015

7.4.22 Linux

17 September 2014
Operating system Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, Android
Type Grid computing and Volunteer computing
License LGPL[1]
Project licensing varies
Website boinc.berkeley.edu

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is an open-source middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.

BOINC has been developed by a team based at the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at the University of California, Berkeley led by David Anderson, who also leads SETI@home. As a high performance distributed computing platform, BOINC has about 235,980 active participants and 692,208 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 9.871 petaFLOPS as of January 16, 2015.[2] BOINC is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through awards SCI/0221529,[3] SCI/0438443[4] and SCI/0721124.[5]

The framework is supported by various operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Android,[6] Linux and FreeBSD.[7] BOINC is free software which is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

History

BOINC was originally developed to manage the SETI@home project.

The original SETI client was a non-BOINC software exclusively for SETI@home. As one of the first volunteer grid computing projects, it was not designed with a high level of security. Some participants in the project attempted to cheat the project to gain "credits", while some others submitted entirely falsified work. BOINC was designed, in part, to combat these security breaches.[8]

The BOINC project started in February 2002 and the 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,[9] followed by the first OpenCL application in 2010.

As of January 2015, 68 BOINC projects are active.[10]

Design and structure

BOINC Manager icon

In essence, BOINC is software that can use the unused CPU and GPU cycles on a computer to do scientific computing—what one individual does not use of his/her computer, BOINC uses. In late 2008, BOINC's official website announced that NVIDIA (a leading GPU manufacturer) had developed a system called CUDA that uses GPUs for scientific computing. With NVIDIA's assistance, some BOINC-based projects (e.g., SETI@home, MilkyWay@home) now have applications that run on NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA. Beginning in October 2009, BOINC added support for the ATI/AMD family of GPUs also. These applications run from 2× to 10× faster than the former CPU-only versions. In 7.x preview versions, GPU support (via OpenCL) was added for computers using Mac OS X with AMD Radeon graphic cards.

BOINC consists of a server system and client software that communicate with each other to distribute, process, and return workunits.

User interfaces

BOINC can be controlled remotely by remote procedure calls (RPC), from the command line, and from the BOINC Account 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) 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 account managers include:

Credit system

Main article: BOINC Credit System

The BOINC Credit System is designed to avoid cheating by validating results before granting credit.

BOINC projects

There are about 70 projects currently listed,[11] of which about half yield published reports.[12] The licensing of the projects varies.

See also

References

  1. ↑ BOINC is now distributed under the Lesser GPL, BOINC, University of California, Berkeley, 2005-01-15, retrieved 2012-08-19
  2. ↑ "BOINC". Boinc.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2014-07-27.
  3. ↑ Research and Infrastructure Development for Public-Resource Scientific Computing, The National Science Foundation
  4. ↑ SCI: NMI Development for Public-Resource Computing and Storage, The National Science Foundation
  5. ↑ SDCI NMI Improvement: Middleware for Volunteer Computing, The National Science Foundation
  6. ↑ "Put your Android device to work on World Community Grid!". July 22, 2013.
  7. ↑ "Manual sites of FreeBSD system". January 2, 2015.
  8. ↑ Anderson, David P. "Public Computing: Reconnecting People to Science". Retrieved 2007-06-13.
  9. ↑ Kamran Karimi, Neil Dickson, and Firas Hamze (2010). "High-Performance Physics Simulations Using Multi-Core CPUs and GPGPUs in a Volunteer Computing Context" (PDF). International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. doi:10.1177/1094342010372928.
  10. ↑ Willy de Zutter. "BOINCstats/BAM! | Project stats info". Boincstats.com. Retrieved 2015-01-22.
  11. ↑ BOINCstats, Willy de Zutter, retrieved 2012-08-19
  12. ↑ Publications by BOINC projects, BOINC wiki, University of California, Berkeley, retrieved 2012-08-19

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.