Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
Encyclopedia
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, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computer
s 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 451,260 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 5.612 petaFLOPS
as of June 2011. BOINC is funded by the National Science Foundation
(NSF) 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 Mac OS X
, Linux
and FreeBSD
. BOINC is free software
which is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License
(LGPL).
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.
The BOINC project started in February 2002 and the first version was released on 10 April 2002. The first BOINC-based project was Predictor@home
launched on 9 June 2004.
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
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 2x to 10x faster than the former CPU-only versions.
BOINC consists of a server
system and client software that communicate with each other to distribute, process, and return workunits.
s (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.
The account manager concept was conceived and developed jointly by GridRepublic
and BOINC. Current account managers include:
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
middleware
Middleware
Middleware is computer software that connects software components or people and their applications. The software consists of a set of services that allows multiple processes running on one or more machines to interact...
system for volunteer
Volunteer computing
Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which computer owners donate their computing resources to one or more "projects".-History:...
and grid computing
Grid computing
Grid computing is a term referring to the combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach a common goal. The grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve a large number of files...
. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home
SETI@home
SETI@home is an Internet-based public volunteer computing project employing the BOINC software platform, hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence...
project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications
Distributed computing
Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems. A distributed system consists of multiple autonomous computers that communicate through a computer network. The computers interact with each other in order to achieve a common goal...
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 computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
s around the world.
BOINC has been developed by a team based at the Space Sciences Laboratory
Space Sciences Laboratory
The Space Sciences Laboratory is an Organized Research Unit of the University of California, Berkeley. It is located in the Berkeley Hills above the university campus...
(SSL) at the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
led by David Anderson
David P. Anderson
David Pope Anderson is a Research Scientist at the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Houston...
, who also leads SETI@home. As a high performance distributed computing platform, BOINC has about 451,260 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 5.612 petaFLOPS
FLOPS
In computing, FLOPS is a measure of a computer's performance, especially in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations, similar to the older, simpler, instructions per second...
as of June 2011. BOINC is funded by the National Science Foundation
National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation is a United States government agency that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National Institutes of Health...
(NSF) through awards SCI/0221529, SCI/0438443 and SCI/0721124.
The framework is supported by various operating systems, including Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
and various Unix-like
Unix-like
A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....
systems including Mac OS X
Mac OS X
Mac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
, Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
and FreeBSD
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...
. BOINC is free software
Free software
Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
which is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License
GNU Lesser General Public License
The GNU Lesser General Public License or LGPL is a free software license published by the Free Software Foundation . It was designed as a compromise between the strong-copyleft GNU General Public License or GPL and permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License...
(LGPL).
History
BOINC was originally developed to manage the SETI@homeSETI@home
SETI@home is an Internet-based public volunteer computing project employing the BOINC software platform, hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence...
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.
The BOINC project started in February 2002 and the first version was released on 10 April 2002. The first BOINC-based project was Predictor@home
Predictor@home
Predictor@home was a distributed computing project that used BOINC.It was established by The Scripps Research Institute to predict protein structure from protein sequence in the context of the 6th biannual CASP, or Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction...
launched on 9 June 2004.
Design and structure
In essence BOINC is software that can use the unused CPU
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
and GPU
Graphics processing unit
A graphics processing unit or GPU is a specialized circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory in such a way so as to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display...
cycles on a computer
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
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
NVIDIA
Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...
(a leading GPU manufacturer) had developed a system called CUDA
CUDA
CUDA or Compute Unified Device Architecture is a parallel computing architecture developed by Nvidia. CUDA is the computing engine in Nvidia graphics processing units that is accessible to software developers through variants of industry standard programming languages...
that uses GPUs for scientific computing. With NVIDIA's assistance, some BOINC-based projects (e.g., SETI@home
SETI@home
SETI@home is an Internet-based public volunteer computing project employing the BOINC software platform, hosted by the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, in the United States. SETI is an acronym for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence...
, MilkyWay@home
MilkyWay@Home
MilkyWay@home is a volunteer distributed computing project in astrophysics running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform...
) now have applications that run on NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA. Beginning in October 2009, BOINC added support for the ATI
ATI Technologies
ATI Technologies Inc. was a semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, Canada, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985 as Array Technologies Inc., the company was listed publicly in 1993 and was acquired by Advanced Micro...
/AMD
Advanced Micro Devices
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. or AMD is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Sunnyvale, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for commercial and consumer markets...
family of GPUs also. These applications run from 2x to 10x faster than the former CPU-only versions.
BOINC consists of a server
Server (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
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 callRemote procedure call
In computer science, a remote procedure call is an inter-process communication that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction...
s (RPC), from the command line, and from the BOINC Account Manager.
BOINC Manager currently has two "views": the Advanced View and the Simplified GUI
Gui
Gui or guee is a generic term to refer to grilled dishes in Korean cuisine. These most commonly have meat or fish as their primary ingredient, but may in some cases also comprise grilled vegetables or other vegetarian ingredients. The term derives from the verb, "gupda" in Korean, which literally...
. The Grid View was removed in the 6.6.x clients as it was redundant.
The appearance (skin
Skin (computing)
In computing, a skin is a custom graphical appearance achieved by the use of a graphical user interface that can be applied to specific software and websites to suit the purpose, topic, or tastes of different users....
) 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
GridRepublic
GridRepublic is a BOINC Account Manager. GridRepublic focuses on creating a clean and simple way to join and interact with BOINC. The GridRepublic philosophy is to keep everything clean and simple to encourage general public participation in volunteer computing. The mission of GridRepublic is to...
and BOINC. Current account managers include:
- BAM! (BOINC Account Manager) (The first publicly available Account Manager, released for public use on May 30th 2006)
- GridRepublic (Follows the idea of keep it simple and keep it neat when it comes to account management)
- Charity Engine (Non-profit account manager, using lottery to motivate people to join the grid)
- Dazzler (Opensource Account Manager, to ease management institutional resources)
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.
See also
- List of distributed computing projects
- United Devices Cancer Research Project
- Citizen Cyberscience CentreCitizen Cyberscience CentreThe Citizen Cyberscience Centre is an organization for volunteer computing formed as a parterneship between CERN, UNITAR, and the University of Geneva....
- BossaBossa (computing)The Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation is a software framework for distributed thinking - the use of volunteers on the Internet to perform tasks that require human intelligence, knowledge, or cognitive skills.- History :David P...