Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a distributed computing infrastructure intended to be useful to fields beyond SETI. It is being developed by a team based at the University of California, Berkeley led by the project director of SETI@home, David Anderson.
The success of SETI@home—which after its launch in 1999 quickly became the most powerful computing network ever assembled—made it clear that distributed computing could be used for many other computing-intensive scientific projects. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers in areas as diverse as molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics to tap into the enormous but under-utilized calculating power of personal computers world-wide. In essence BOINC is software that can use the unused CPU cycles on a computer, to analyse scientific data—what you don't use of your computer, it uses.
In December 2003, Sun Microsystems announced it would donate some of its own products—including Solaris servers, and workstations—to BOINC (Vance, 2003).
BOINC is designed to be a free structure for anyone wishing to start a distributed computing project. The major parts include the backend server, which can run on one machine or many, making it scalable to projects of any size. The user side consists of the BOINC client itself, which manages all of the network transfers as well as the starting and stopping of work. The client side is also able to automatically download science applications from projects, which do the math for the project. Projects are able to have multiple types for work units that use different applications to process different types of data. BOINC also provides structures for homogonous redundancy (sending work units only to computers of the same platform), trickling (sending information to the server before the work unit completes), and locality scheduling (sending work units to computers that already have the necessary files).
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Projects Using BOINC
- SETI@home—Website
- ClimatePrediction.net—Website
- Predictor@home—Website (Alpha)
- Astropulse —Website
- Einstein@Home—Website
- Pirates@home —Website (part of Einstein@home)
- LHC@home—Website
- BURP —Website (Pre-Alpha)
Statistic Pages
BOINC projects export statistical informationin the form of XML files and make it available for anyone to download. Many different third party statistics websites have been developed to track the progress of BOINC projects. The statistics track computers, users, and teams within individual projects and across many projects.
- BOINCstats.com—Website by Willy de Zutter
- Boinc.dk—Website by Janus Kristensen
- BOINC Statistics for the WORLD!—Website by Zain Upton
References
- Vance, Ashlee. (2003). Sun and UC Berkeley are about to BOINC. Retrieved December 18, 2003 from http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/61/34570.html.
See also
External links
- BOINC website at UC Berkeley
- Plan for transitioning SETI@home to BOINC
- Unofficial optimized BOINC clients for Linux
- Unofficial BOINC Owner's Manual, Unofficial BOINC Web Site Owner's Manual, FAQ, Glossary, and more ...
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