Everything about Boinc totally explained
The
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (
BOINC) is a non-commercial
middleware system for
volunteer computing, originally developed to support the
SETI@home project, but intended to be useful for other applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, 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 at the
University of California, Berkeley led by
David Anderson, who also leads SETI@home. As a "quasi-supercomputing" platform, BOINC has over 560,000 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 1.1
PFLOPS as of
May 20,
2008. BOINC is funded by the
National Science Foundation through awards SCI/0221529, SCI/0438443 and SCI/0721124.
The framework is supported by various operating systems, including
Microsoft Windows and various
Unix-like systems including
Linux,
FreeBSD and
Mac OS X. Released under the
GNU Lesser General Public License, BOINC is
free software.
Design and structure of BOINC
BOINC is designed to be a free structure for anyone wishing to start a volunteer computing project. Most BOINC projects are
nonprofit and rely heavily, if not completely, on
volunteers.
In essence BOINC is
software that can use the unused
CPU cycles on a
computer to do scientific computing—what you don't use of your computer, it uses.
BOINC consists of a
server system and client software that communicate with each other to distribute, process, and return work units.
BOINC 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 three 'views': the
Advanced View, the
Grid View and the
Simplified GUI.
The appearance (
skin) of the Simplified GUI is user-customizable, in that users can create their own designs.
Account Managers
The account manager concept was conceived and developed jointly by
GridRepublic and BOINC. Current account managers include:
BOINC Credit System
The BOINC Credit System is designed to avoid cheating by validating results before granting credit.
A credit management system helps to ensure that users are returning results which are both scientifically and statistically accurate.
Online distributed computing is almost entirely a volunteer endeavor. For this reason projects are dependent on a complicated and variable mix of new users, long-term users, and retiring users.
There is no single generic reason why someone chooses to donate his or her computing resources to any given project.
Origins of the BOINC platform
BOINC was originally developed to manage the SETI@home project.
The original SETI client was a non-BOINC software exclusively for SETI@home. Being one of the first volunteer grid computing projects, it wasn't 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.
Projects using BOINC Framework
Further Information
Get more info on 'Boinc'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://berkeley_open_infrastructure_for_network_computing.totallyexplained.com">Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
