Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing


The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing and grid computing. Originally developed to support the SETI@home project, it became generalized as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, linguistics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics, among others. BOINC aims to enable researchers to tap into the enormous processing resources of multiple personal computers around the world.
BOINC development originated with a team based at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and led by David Anderson, who also leads SETI@home. As a high-performance distributed computing platform, BOINC brings together about 137,805 active participants and 791,443 active computers worldwide processing on average 41.548 PetaFLOPS . The National Science Foundation funds BOINC through awards SCI/0221529, SCI/0438443 and SCI/0721124. Guinness World Records ranks BOINC as the largest computing grid in the world.
BOINC code runs on various operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, macOS, Android, Linux and FreeBSD. BOINC is free software released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

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. As a result, 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.
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, followed by the first OpenCL application in 2010.
, 31 BOINC projects are active.

Design and structure

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 had developed a system called CUDA that uses GPUs for scientific computing. With NVIDIA's assistance, some BOINC-based projects 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 times faster than the former CPU-only versions. In 7.x preview versions, GPU support 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 and process work units and return the results.

User interfaces

BOINC can be controlled remotely by remote procedure calls, 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 of the Simplified GUI is user-customizable, in that users can create their own designs.

Mobile application

A BOINC app also exists for Android, allowing every person owning an Android device – smartphone, tablet and 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, Enigma@home, LHC@home, Moo! Wrapper, Quake Catcher Network, Rosetta@home, SETI@home, Universe@Home, World Community Grid and Yoyo@home.

Account managers

A BOINC Account Manager is an application that manages multiple BOINC project accounts across multiple computers 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:
The BOINC Credit System is designed to avoid cheating by validating results before granting credit.
There are 31 active projects listed in the BOINC official website.
Amicable Numbers - Mathematics
Asteroids@home - Astrophysics
BOINC@TACC - Multiple scientific areas
Citizen Science Grid - Molecular biology, Computer
Science
Climateprediction.net - Climate study
Collatz Conjecture - Mathematics
Cosmology@Home - Astronomy
Einstein@home - Astrophysics
Gerasim@Home - Computer engineering
GPUGrid.net - Molecular simulations of proteins
Ibercivis BOINC - Biomedicine
LHC@home - Physics
Milkyway@home - Astronomy
MindModeling@Home - Cognitive Science
Minecraft@Home - Games
MLC@Home - Artificial Intelligence
Moo! Wrapper - Cryptography and combinatorics
nanoHUB@Home - Nanoscience
NFS@home - Factorization of large integers
NumberFields@home - Mathematics
ODLK1 - Mathematics
PrimeGrid - Mathematics
QuChemPedIA@home - Molecular Chemistry
Radioactive@Home - Environmental research
RakeSearch - Mathematics
RNA World - Molecular biology
Rosetta@home - Biology
SRBase - Mathematics
Universe@Home - Astronomy
World Community Grid - Medical, environmental and other humanitarian research
Yoyo@home - Mathematics