News archive
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Mar 28, 2008
Read about a new BOINC-based project,
Quake Catcher Network,
in
Wired and
Nature News.
Mar 20, 2008
Watch an excellent talk by CERN's Francois Grey,
From distributed computing to distributed thinking.
Mar 5, 2008
Read Volunteer Computing and the Search for Big Answers, an article about BOINC and volunteer computing on LinuxInsider.com.
Feb 27, 2008
Scientific progress goes BOINC! Read about the
Scientific
publications of BOINC-based projects.
Feb 12, 2008
Where is BOINC headed? Marcin Cieslak's vision:
BOINC on JXTA.
Feb 11, 2008
Bulgarian BOINC users:
find forums and information in your language at
BOINC Bulgaria.
Feb 7, 2008
Proteins@Home
has resumed operations.
Check out their paper on computational protein design
in the Journal of Computational Chemistry.
Jan 31, 2008
The TSP project
is featured in International Science Grid This Week: Traveling salesman meets distributed computing.
Jan 31, 2008
BOINC has broken the PetaFLOP barrier!
According to BOINCStats,
106 million units of credit were granted yesterday,
which translates to 1.06 PetaFLOP/sec.
Congratulations to all projects and participants.
Jan 24, 2008
A paper describing results of the Quantum Monte Carlo at Home project recently appeared in the
Journal of Physical Chemistry A (JPCA).
Jan 15, 2008
A new article from the Planetary Society:
From SETI@home to Hominid Fossils: Citizen Cyberscience Reshapes Research Landscape.
Jan 14, 2008
The cross-project statistics site
All Project Stats.com
has many improvements and new features,
include credit-based signature images for users and teams.
Jan 10, 2008
A new competition for BOINC teams,
Formula BOINC,
is based on their position with projects (as in Formula 1 racing)
rather than overall credit.
This rewards teams that are diversified across many projects.
Dec 26, 2007
A story in the Chicago Tribune, "Bit by bit, home computers aid science",
highlights Cosmology@home.
Dec 18, 2007
The Lattice Project,
based at the University of Maryland
Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology,
is now open to volunteers.
Lattice runs several applications, and supplies computing power to
a number of Life Sciences researchers.
Current areas of study include
evolutionary relationships based on DNA sequence data;
bacterial, plasmid, and virus protein sequences;
and biological diversity in nature reserves.
Dec 5, 2007
Watch a YouTube video about the science behind Rosetta@home.
Dec 5, 2007
The TSP
(Traveling Salesman Problem) project is using BOINC to
find the shortest path between the capitals of the lower 48 states.
Dec 3, 2007
This web site, and the BOINC-Wide Teams site,
will be down for about 18 hours starting at 3 PM PST, Dec 6.
November 28, 2007
Live in Washington DC? Get together with other BOINC users via
Meetup
(or create a Meetup
in your own city).
November 16, 2007
Leiden Classical allows students (and the public)
to submit particle-system simulation jobs,
and is thus a resource for both education and research.
The job-submission system used by Leiden Classical is now
included in the BOINC source code distribution.
November 2, 2007
BOINC needs more volunteer programmers!
If you're proficient in PHP and MySQL, C++ and WxWidgets,
or C++ system programming,
please read
about how you can help.
October 22, 2007
The BOINC-based BBC
Climate Change Experiment has won the prestigious
Prix Europa
award in the Internet category.
October 21, 2007
Conmunix has released version 3.0 beta of
Boinc LCS
(Live Client State), a PHP script that allows you to monitor
the current state and other information from each of
your BOINC clients.
October 18, 2007
BOINC user John Koulouris has written The Big BOINC! Projects and Chronology Page,
a brief history of BOINC.
October 17, 2007
Congratulations to the UK BOINC Team,
which today became the first UK-specific team to
pass the 100 million combined credits mark.
October 17, 2007
An article in Nature,
The shape of protein structures to come, discusses the goals and progress of the
Rosetta@home project from the University of Washington.
October 12, 2007
LHC@home has moved from CERN to the University of London.
Read about it here.
October 4, 2007
The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year grant,
NSF award #OCI-0721124, to the BOINC project.
This will support our development efforts through August 2010.
September 26, 2007
The Third Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop took place 5-6 Sept. in Geneva.
The proceedings, including talk slides and notes from
the breakout sessions, are
here.
September 25, 2007
Check out the SHA-1 Collision Search Graz
project, which is based at the Graz University of Technology
and does research in cryptography.
September 24, 2007
Team founders: you can now make your team
BOINC-wide,
meaning that it will be created on all
current and future BOINC projects.
September 24, 2007
A one-day session on BOINC will be presented at the
Advanced Computing and GRID technologies for Research school in Hanoi, November 5-16, 2007.
September 21, 2007
A paper about scheduling in BOINC
will appear in the 3rd IEEE International Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing. Banagalore, India, December 10-13 2007.
September 7, 2007
The new BOINC logo is now available in
a variety of formats and resolutions.
August 17, 2007
World Community Grid has announced that it is
migrating fully to BOINC.
Welcome to all WCG participants!
July 25, 2007
BOINC finally has a new logo!
Many thanks Michal Krakowiak, the graphic designer who created it.
The logo (and icons based on it)
will soon appear on the BOINC client software
as well as the web site.
July 23, 2007
The Africa@home workshop on volunteer computing with BOINC,
sponsored by the Geneva International Academic Network (GIAN),
was held recently at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Muizenberg, South Africa.
July 20, 2007
A newly-launched project, Eternity2.net,
offers a chance to compute for a share of a US$2,000,000 prize.
July 20, 2007
Team leaders: check out the
BOINC Team Leaders Forum,
a place to chat and discuss team-building on BOINC projects.
July 16, 2007
If you use the Yahoo! Widget Engine,
check out version 1.1 of the BOINC Server Status widget.
July 16, 2007
BOINC is now the preferred client software at
World Community Grid.
July 12, 2007
Leiden Classical
is using BOINC for education - it provides a
high-performance computing resource for
students of Theoretical Chemistry at Leiden University.
July 10, 2007
A growing number of 'skins' for the BOINC simple GUI are available
from crunching-family.at.
Here's an example.
July 6, 2007
Welcome to a new web site with cross-project BOINC statistics:
Team Starfire World BOINC Stats 'N Stones.
July 5, 2007
Windows users:
version 2.0 of nBOiNC,
an add-on application for viewing your up-to-the-minute credit totals,
has been released.
July 4, 2007
Docking@home is moving from Texas to Delaware. Volunteers should detach from the project; you will be emailed when the project is alive in Delaware.
July 2, 2007
Read Volunteer computing: Grid or not Grid? on International Science Grid This Week.
July 2, 2007
Amir Alexander of The Planetary Society talks about
SETI, distributed computing, and space exploration in an interview by Mike of BOINC UK.
June 28, 2007
Linux users: if you use bash,
check out a cool script
that provides command completion in both boinc_cmd and boinc_client
(thanks to Frank S. Thomas).
June 27, 2007
Help increase volunteer computing power -
publicize BOINC by writing to computer magazines.
June 26, 2007
There's a great new statistics site,
BOINC All Project Stats.
It has lists of the top users and teams,
recent changes in rankings, graphs showing history and
breakdown by project, and many other features.
You can also see the stats and rankings
of an individual volunteer or team across all BOINC projects.
Thanks to Markus Tervooren for putting this together!
June 26, 2007
There are reports that version 5.10.8 of the BOINC client software
causes a problem on Windows XP Pro in which the desktop becomes empty.
If you see this, please uninstall 5.10.8 and install version 5.8.16.
June 3, 2007
BOINCstats and BAM! are now viewable in Finnish
(http://fi.boincstats.com).
May 31, 2007
Sony Playstation 3 owners: researchers at the Barcelona
Biomedical Research Park have launched
PS3GRID,
a BOINC-based project whose application
(molecular dynamics simulations) runs on the
PS3's Cell processor, on Linux.
May 29, 2007
Check out a video promoting BOINC on YouTube.
May 28, 2007
A Flash guide to using BOINC with IBM World Community Grid is available in Czech and English.
May 14, 2007
The 3rd Pan-Galactic
BOINC Workshop will be held 5-6 September 2007 in Geneva, Switzerland.
May 9, 2007
The BOINC Virtual Server - a VMWare virtual machine
preconfigured with BOINC and all prerequisite software -
is now available.
This greatly simplifies the task of creating a BOINC projects.
Thanks to Christian Beer for creating this.
May 8, 2007
As of about May 1, BOINC projects have had
over one million volunteers.
May 6, 2007
An excellent article on BOINC and the projects using it
appeared today in the Catalan newspaper AVUI.
It is available in PDF (pages
one
and two)
and also as a web page.
Thanks to Dr. Jordi Portell i de Mora for telling us about it.
May 6, 2007
BOINCstats and BAM!
are now available in 15 languages.
As of today, they are now viewable in Swedish
( http://se.boincstats.com).
May 3, 2007
The source code behind BOINC Combined Stats is now available via Subversion. This may be helpful for other statistics site developers.
April 24, 2007
GridRepublic announces
a significant upgrade to their web site, including improved
registration workflow and better integration with IBM World Community Grid
(including WCG sub-project registration).
April 23, 2007
Krystof Dolezal's
Flash-based BOINC tutorials
are now available in English and Slovak,
as well as Czech.
April 23, 2007
BOINCstats and BAM! are now available in the Czech language
(http://cz.boincstats.com).
Thanks to Zelvuska for the translation.
April 17, 2007
Desktopgrid.hu
has been created by the Computer and Automation Research Institute
(SZATAKI) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA).
It provides information (and software downloads) for using
BOINC for desktop Grid computing.
April 16, 2007
BOINC is now using Trac,
an integrated software project management system.
In particular:
1) the BOINC source code repository now uses Subversion;
2) the BOINC bug database has been moved to Trac;
3) documentation will be moved to a Wiki.
See the BOINC/Trac page.
April 11, 2007
The BBC documentary 'Meltdown',
which highlights Climateprediction.net,
has been nominated for
a British Academy of
Film and Television Arts academy award.
April 4, 2007
Dr. Anderson gave the keynote talk,
Volunteer Computing: Planting the Flag,
at the PCGrid 2007 workshop,
held at the IPDPS conference in Long Beach on March 30.
March 29, 2007
If you can read Czech, czech out some excellent
Flash-based BOINC tutorials.
March 23, 2007
Africa@home (with support from the
Geneva International Academic Network)
is sponsoring an
intensive one-week workshop on volunteer computing
for qualified African students,
to be held at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences
in Muizenberg, South Africa, 16-22 July 2007.
March 9, 2007
Don't use them for postage, but check out the
BOINC stamps
created by Myster65 and Rebirther.
March 6, 2007
The article Idle Cycles - building distributed applications with BOINC Seil appears in the Oct 2006 issue of
Linux Magazine.
In it, author Marc Seil
provides a detailed description of how to set up a BOINC project.
March 1, 2007
With BOINCpe
you can run a dedicated BOINC machine using a RAM disk,
starting from only 256 MB of total RAM.
This lets you operate a BOINC farm more energy-efficiently
or to use machines without hard disk drives for BOINC.
February 28, 2007
The BOINC web server recently underwent a
hardware and software upgrade. Certain projects and
pages may still be offline as we continue to configure
the new system.
February 8, 2007
Marc Seil gave a talk on setting up a BOINC server
at the recent LinuxDays
conference in Luxembourg.
His slides are here.
February 5, 2007
GridRepublic
has been selected as a finalist for the Web Awards
at the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival. Please
click here
to cast your vote for them at the SXSW website.
February 3, 2007
The documentation on Creating BOINC Projects is now available as
one big PDF file.
January 24, 2007
The BOINC FAQ Service
answers many questions about using BOINC.
It is available in English, German, and Dutch.
January 19, 2007
Check out a
TV news segment
and a web site
about the results of the recently-completed
BBC Climate Change Experiment.
On January 21 BBC aired a documentary on the results of this project;
an excerpt is here.
January 18, 2007
The paper "Reporting@Home: Delivering Dynamic Graphical Feedback to Participants in Community Computing Projects"
describes how Rosetta@home delivers personalized
graphical progress reports to its volunteers.
January 17, 2007
Linux users: check out
KBoincMgr,
a replacement for the BOINC Manager.
KBoincMgr can manage multiple BOINC clients,
and has other features too numerous to mention.
January 17, 2007
On Sunday 21 Jan. at 8pm BBC 1 will broadcast
Climate Change: Britain Under Threat.
This will include results from the BBC and CPDN experiments,
and an interview with CPDN staff.
In addition, results should appear on the BBC Climate Change website.
January 7, 2007
The ABC@home project,
based at Leiden University
in Holland, is now open.
ABC@home is studying the ABC conjecture,
a major open problem in mathematics.
January 6, 2007
MySpace users: check out the
BOINC on MySpace group.
December 29, 2006
A paper about BOINC client scheduling will appear in the
Workshop on Large-Scale, Volatile Desktop Grids held in conjunction with the IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), March 30, 2007, Long Beach.
December 28, 2006
The Proteins@Home project is now open.
Proteins@Home is a large-scale protein structure prediction project,
and is based at the École Polytechnique in Paris.
December 21, 2006
Some AOL users are unable to attach to some projects.
A work-around for this problem is described
here.
December 8, 2006
Olaf Bornack of
Team BOINC@Halle/Saale
has supplied
stencils
for creating skins for the new BOINC GUI.
These have been used to make skins with
BOINCcast,
BOINC@Halle/Saale, and BOINCmas! themes.
December 6, 2006
Linux users: check out the new
BOINCTail add-on.
December 4, 2006
BOINC's new Online Help system
lets you get help from volunteers
by talking with them using Skype.
Volunteers speak several languages.
December 4, 2006
It hasn't been released yet,
but already several skins are available for BOINC Manager version 5.8
(currently under test as version 5.7.x).
Check out Crunching Family Skin Downloads.
December 4, 2006
A recent article in the Bulletin of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
A Cast of Thousands, discusses the
Rosetta@home project
and its army of dedicated volunteers.
November 27, 2006
Jean-Michel Penasse of L'Alliance Francophone
has create a web site,
www.myboinc.com,
showing the User of the Day of all BOINC projects
going back to October 8 2006. Check it out!
November 23, 2006
Docking@home participants:
the project is unreachable because of a campus-wide network
connection failure at Univ. of Texas - El Paso.
Please check back periodically.
November 15, 2006
BOINCstats is now available in Spanish.
Thanks to Miquel Pericas for the translation.
BOINCstats in Spanish can be visited at
http://es.boincstats.com.
November 7, 2006
Check out new add-on software:
the SETI@home Toolbar
for Firefox and IE on Windows (SETI@home-specific), and
Boinctray,
a system tray application for Linux.
November 7, 2006
We are preparing to release client software with
a new GUI that is simpler, smaller, and more graphical
than the current BOINC manager.
Projects can supply their own graphics
(icons, application-specific slideshows) for use in this GUI;
see instructions for how to do this.
In addition, the GUI itself is skinnable;
a skin consists of
an XML
file and a collection of images.
October 17, 2006
Issue 3 of
bunc (BOINC UK newsletter) is now online, with articles on a wide range of topics.
October 9, 2006
Interested in getting a one-CPU-month job finished in five minutes?
BOINC can potentially help you do this, but
some work is needed.
October 8, 2006
Versions of BOINC (and some applications) are now
available for
Solaris (x86, i686, SPARC),
Linux (Alpha, SPARC),
FreeBSD (x86, Alpha) and
HPUX (including the BOINC Manager) from
www.lb.shuttle.de.
October 4, 2006
Eric Korpela and David Anderson were interviewed today
by Mike O'Connell of BOINC UK.
Many topics were covered, including the question of
credit and optimized clients.
Download a recording of the conversation (MP3, 13.5 MB) from
BOINC UK
or a mirror at Berkeley.
September 26, 2006
The 2nd Annual Pangalactic BOINC Workshop was held
in Geneva on 20-21 September.
Read the online workshop proceedings.
September 11, 2006
UW-Madison CAE,
the first BOINC user to top the 1 TERAFLOPS barrier,
now has surpassed 2 TERAFLOPS. Congratulations!
September 2, 2006
The Spinhenge project
has moved into public beta test,
and is accepting new participant accounts.
August 24, 2006
GridRepublic,
a BOINC account manager, recently moved into beta test.
It was written up by CNET.
August 20, 2006
BOINC and SETI@home are featured in
an
article in Asahi-shinbun,
one of the most popular newspapers in Japan.
August 16, 2006
New documents discuss using BOINC for
Desktop Grid Computing
and for creating
Virtual Campus Supercomputing Centers.
August 15, 2006
A BBC Radio program on 'Citizen Science' - including
a segment on volunteer computing and BOINC -
will air tomorrow, 16 Aug 2006, 9 PM British Time.
It will also be available
online.
August 14, 2006
Participants with preferences for different venues
(home, school, work) can now view these side-by-side
in a multi-column format.
Also, preference values are now checked for validity.
Thanks to Christian Beer for the PHP programming behind
these improvements.
August 11, 2006
An article about
Quantum Monte Carlo at Home appeared 03.08.2006 in the German newspaper WAZ.
August 3, 2006
A recent update of McAfee security software on Windows
causes BOINC 5.4.9 to not work (details).
We have released a new version, 5.4.11,
that fixes the problem and works with the latest McAfee software.
August 2, 2006
The 2nd Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop
will be held 20-21 September at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.
Anyone actively involved with BOINC is encouraged to attend.
July 26, 2006
Chess960@home
is open for testers.
This project studies a game that is like classical chess
except that the initial configuration of pieces
is chosen randomly from among 960 possibilities.
July 25, 2006
Welcome to three new BOINC-based projects.
Two are mathematical:
Riesel Sieve
looks for prime numbers of the form k2n-1,
and Rectilinear Crossing Number
studies a problem in computational geometry.
The third, Spinhenge@home,
studies molecular magnets and controlled nanoscale magnetism,
which may have applications in medicine and biotechnology.
July 22, 2006
BOINC user survey:
due to a bug in our software, answers to the question
'Which are the most important factors when you decide whether to participate in a BOINC project?' were not recorded correctly.
Please fill out the survey form again.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
July 21, 2006
The BOINC survey is now available in
Japanese.
If you'd like to translate it to another language,
please contact us.
July 13, 2006
We are conducting an online survey
of BOINC participants.
Please fill out the survey form -
your responses will help us improve BOINC and the projects that use it.
July 13, 2006
Articles in
Nature,
The Economist
and WebWire
describe Africa@home,
an initiative that supports African humanitarian causes.
Their first BOINC-based project,
malariacontrol.net,
studies malaria epidemiology.
Africa@home is a collaboration of the Swiss Tropical Institute,
CERN, and a group of universities (three of them from Africa).
July 7, 2006
The TANPAKU
project, based at the Tokyo University of Science,
is open for participation.
TANPAKU (from the Japanese word tanpaku-shitsu,
meaning 'protein') studies protein structure and function
using a novel method called Brownian Dynamics.
June 30, 2006
Want to deploy BOINC quickly and easily on a Windows network?
Read The Lazy Slug's Guide
to easy deployment and maintenance of BOINC on your network.
June 29, 2006
A
paper about BOINC's API and runtime system
will appear in the SC06 conference.
June 28, 2006
A new Secure BOINC Client
for the Macintosh is available for testing.
This version limits BOINC applications' access to your system and data,
thus protecting your computer from accidental or malicious damage
or data theft.
June 22, 2006
Pav Lucistnik has developed
boinc_curses,
a Unix console-based program (like 'top')
to monitor and control BOINC.
June 21, 2006
BOINCstats and the BAM! account manager
are now available in Japanese.
June 15, 2006
BOINC's CPU scheduler has become smarter:
it now waits until an application has checkpointed
to preempt it and remove it from memory.
This can save significant CPU time, especially on multiprocessors.
Technical details are here.
The new scheduler is in the development version of BOINC,
and will appear in the 5.6 release.
Volunteer developer John McLeod VII was the driving
force behind the new scheduler.
June 14, 2006
We have added preliminary support for
legacy applications
that do not use the BOINC API
(e.g. because their source code is not available).
This feature will work with the next version
(5.6) of the BOINC client software.
June 10, 2006
The BOINC UK Newsletter Circular (bunc) has released its June 2006 edition,
featuring an interview with David Anderson.
June 7, 2006
Windows users: if BOINC applications are repeatedly
crashing on your computer,
it's possibly that you need to
upgrade to the latest version of DirectX.
May 31, 2006
Recent newspaper articles on BOINC and Rosetta@home:
Worldwide, 690,000 help computer effort and
Medical researcher taps the power of home computing.
May 30, 2006
The BOINCStats Account Manager
(BAM!) is now available for use.
BAM! provides 'one-stop shopping' for finding
and attaching to BOINC project;
see the news item of May 11.
Thanks to Willy de Zutter for developing BAM!.
May 25, 2006
BOINC has added preliminary support for 'low-latency' computing;
e.g. delay bounds of minutes rather than days.
This requires having clients contact the server frequently;
we've added a mechanism that lets the server specify
the connection interval.
This will be available in the next release (5.6) of the client software.
Projects that are interested in using this mechanism should
contact us.
May 17, 2006
The costs of electricity, both monetary and environmental, are high.
Be aware of the energy considerations
associated with BOINC and volunteer computing.
May 11, 2006
Version 5.4 of the BOINC client software has been released.
This version lets you use account managers -
special web sites that let you browse BOINC projects,
attach/detach, change resource share and settings,
all with point-and-click simplicity.
Account managers are also great if you have several computers -
you make changes on the web site,
and they take effect on all of your computers.
A couple of excellent account managers are nearly ready for use;
stay tuned for details.
May 9, 2006
The first-ever
BOINC birthday cake
appeared at the 7th SETI@home-Catalonia Meeting
(and 1st BOINC-Catalonia Meeting), held in Girona last April 22nd.
Also: BOINC.cat,
a BOINC site in Catalan, has recently opened.
April 30, 2006
The latest German BOINCcast
discusses ClimatePrediction.net;
earlier BOINCcasts cover SIMAP, LHC@home, and uFluids.
April 14, 2006
The CERN Courier's Computer Newsletter features an article on
BOINC activities at CERN.
April 13, 2006
According to various statistics sites,
over one million computers have now contributed
processing power to BOINC projects.
We're currently achieving a sustained processing rate
of over 400 TeraFLOPS - the world's most powerful supercomputer
by a wide margin.
Congratulations and thanks to everyone!
April 13, 2006
We have developed an example application,
together with project files and Makefiles for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
The application demonstrates how to do checkpoint/restart and graphics.
Projects can use this as a framework for building their own applications.
April 6, 2006
Thanks to the efforts of
volunteers,
BOINC is now officially part of the Debian Linux distribution.
Packages for the BOINC
core client
and Manager
are available for 13 different platforms
(alpha, amd64, arm, hppa,
i386, ia64, kfreebsd-i386, m68k, mips, mipsel, powerpc, s390 and sparc).
April 4, 2006
Windows users: new versions of
Intellipoint
and Intellitype
are available from Microsoft.
Upgrading to these may fix problems with the BOINC screensaver.
April 3, 2006
BOINCstats.com is one of
several excellent web sites showing BOINC statistics.
It's available in a number of languages, now including
Chinese.
March 15, 2006
The Seasonal Attribution Project,
a spin-off of Climateprediction.net,
seeks to determine the extent to which extreme weather events
are attributable to human-induced climate change.
Its application is a high-resolution simulation of the world's climate,
and is recommended only for computers
with at least 1 GB of RAM, and a 2.4GHz Pentium or faster processor.
March 5, 2006
Tony/Knightrider/Chuggybus has created BOINC coinage.
See the large
and small versions.
The Latin text means 'Berkeley open and shared resources'.
March 3, 2006
Quantum Monte Carlo at Home
announces the public release of the first chemistry BOINC project.
This project, based at the University of Münster in Germany,
studies the structure and reactivity of molecules using Quantum Chemistry,
whose vastly complex equations require huge amounts of computing power.
February 24, 2006
A significant step has been made towards integrating
BOINC and Grid software:
beginning with Condor version 6.7.17,
Condor can be configured to run BOINC when it has no other work to perform.
This capability is described in the Condor manual.
February 22, 2006
BOINC announces its
support for the Macintosh/Intel platform.
February 19, 2006
BOINCcast
is the first German Podcast about BOINC.
Weekly episodes of 5 minutes length will explain Distributed Computing
and the Goals of BOINC to the German public,
and will present and explain the projects that use BOINC.
February 15, 2006
View a video clip
about the BBC Climate Change Experiment.
February 14, 2006
BOINC and Climateprediction.net have joined forces with the BBC
to launch a new experiment -- a full simulation of climate change
from 1920 to 2080.
The experiment is described on
a BBC television documentary Meltdown
(BBC-4, February 20th, for UK BOINCers).
Simplified client software is available
at bbc.co.uk/climatechange.
Experienced BOINCers can attach to http://bbc.cpdn.org
(check out the new graphics!).
Be warned that a 160-year climate simulation is a long workunit even
by Climateprediction.net's extravagant standards.
But if you have a fast machine and are prepared to give
us first call on your CPU, just for the next couple of months,
then you could see your results in a second BBC television programme
scheduled for May.
February 8, 2006
The SZTAKI Desktop Grid
is now in production.
The project, based at the MTA-SZTAKI Laboratory of Parallel
and Distributed Systems in Budapest, Hungary, is attempting
to find all the generalized binary number systems
(bases are matrices and digits are vectors) up to dimension 11.
February 6, 2006
The Similarity
Matrix of Proteins (SIMAP) project is now in production.
SIMAP, based at the Technical University of Munich,
uses volunteer computers to calculate similarities between proteins.
It provides a public database of the resulting data,
which plays a key role in many bioinformatics research projects.
SIMAP is the first German BOINC-based project.
December 15, 2005
A story
about SETI@home's transition to BOINC appears in the Nature web site.
December 12, 2005
A new paper, The Computational and Storage Potential of Volunteer Computing,
explores the limits of BOINC-based projects.
December 9, 2005
BOINC has a job opening for an experienced programmer
(C++/Python/PHP/SQL/HTML).
For more information go to
http://jobs.berkeley.edu/.
The job is number 003496, and is listed under Information Technology.
November 29, 2005
We have created a new email list,
boinc_announce@ssl.berkeley.edu,
for announcements of new versions of BOINC client software.
November 27, 2005
Check out A BOINC seminar by Juan Antonio Lopez Perez of CERN,
presented at CIEMAT in Madrid, November 2005.
Also available in a
print version.
November 15, 2005
Aggregate credit data
(user and host credit data summed over all BOINC projects)
is now available in XML format.
This data can be used for applications
(like the 'Featured participant' above)
that reflect overall contribution to BOINC project.
November 1, 2005
IBM's World Community Grid
has launched a BOINC-based project (currenly Linux only).
October 28, 2005
David Anderson talks about BOINC and volunteer computing
in a podcast at www.enterpriseleadership.org.
October 20, 2005
Version 5.2.2 of the BOINC client software has been released.
It includes a simpler registration procedure,
security enhancements, and numerous other improvements.
September 25, 2005
Rosetta@home,
a BOINC-based project at the University of Washington,
has launched and is seeking participants.
Its goal is "... to develop methods that accurately
predict and design protein structures
and complexes, an endeavor that may ultimately help researchers
develop cures for human diseases."
September 23, 2005
High-Performance Task Distribution for Volunteer Computing, a paper about BOINC server performance,
will appear in the e-Science 2005 conference in December.
September 6, 2005
Searching for Gravity @ Home, an article about Einstein@home and BOINC,
appears in the September 2005 issue of IEEE's The Institute.
August 29, 2005
A conversation with David Anderson in ACM Queue Magazine.
August 14, 2005
We are redesigning BOINC to use
a user-supplied identifier and password
instead of a system-supplied random key
for identifying an account.
Comments on the design are welcome.
August 9, 2005
BOINC is transitioning to use libcurl
for HTTP operations.
This will allow BOINC to use HTTPS (secure HTTP)
for scheduler requests and file transfers.
August 3, 2005
Non-open-source code (RSAEuro and GLUT) has been removed from BOINC.
OpenSSL's crypto library is used for encryption.
July 25, 2005
A group of students from Cornell have written
Distributing Science,
a very nice article about BOINC
and some of the projects using it.
July 24, 2005
A paper by Jakob Pedersen and Christian Søttrup
discusses the interoperation of the Grid and BOINC.
July 11-12, 2005
The First Pangalactic BOINC Workshop
was held at CERN,
bringing together people from ClimatePrediction.net,
Einstein@home, CERN, and BOINC.
June 25, 2005
BOINC statistics sites continue to evolve.
Check out Every Earthly Hour, developed by Hydnum Repandum
June 24, 2005
We have added
new API calls
that allow applications to do their own CPU benchmarking,
or directly report their floating-point operation count.
This will give more accurate credit numbers for
applications that are optimized for specific architectures
or that use non-CPU computing resources such as GPUs.
June 24, 2005
We've added two mechanisms that give better estimates
of result completion time
(and thus better scheduling and fewer missed deadlines):
1) we track the 'CPU efficiency': the average fraction
of CPU time that BOINC apps receive while they're running
(this can be less than one on systems that run
compute-intensive tasks other than BOINC);
2) we dynamically maintain a per-project upper bound on the
ratio of actual CPU time to predicted CPU time.
June 24, 2005
We've improved and simplified the CPU scheduling and work-fetch policies,
using a detailed simulation of BOINC's weighted round-robin scheduling.
When the simulator predicts that a deadline will be missed,
the client switches to earliest-deadline-first scheduling.
When the simulator predicts that fetching additional work
will cause a deadline to be missed, it suspends work fetch.
June 24, 2005
Account management system
are web sites that let participants sign up for
multiple projects with just a few clicks (and no account keys).
The BOINC manager (development version) now lets you
select, change, or get updated account info from an account manager.
June 24, 2005
BOINC now works in Windows 'service' mode on computers
with dialup connections and the 'confirm before connect' preference set.
The connection confirmation and setup process has been
moved to the BOINC manager, which (unlike a service)
is able to do GUI activities.
June 16, 2005
Climateprediction.net is featured in
an article
in the journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers.
June 3, 2005
Two Wiki-based BOINC informational sites have been launched recently:
The Unofficial BOINC Wiki
(in English) and
Deutsche BOINC FAQ (in German).
Because these sites are Wikis,
participants can add and modify content.
May 31, 2005
BOINC is featured in The Berkeley Science Review.
May 14, 2005
Eric Myers and Charlie Fenton have written
excellent documents on
how to compile BOINC and BOINC applications
on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
May 11, 2005
BOINC and BOINC-based projects are discussed in
the article 'Grassroots Computing'
in the May 6 2005 issue of
Science magazine.
May 10, 2005
LHC@home is a BOINC-based project being used to
simulate the orbits of particles in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read about it in the
CERN Bulletin.
May 10, 2005
As the number of BOINC-based projects has increased,
a problem has emerged - if a computer is attached to lots of projects,
it may have trouble finishing work in time.
We are revising the BOINC client's CPU scheduling
and work-fetch policies to address this issue.
May 10, 2005
Many BOINC applications have interactive graphics
(e.g. you can zoom in/out using the mouse).
For apps that use the latest BOINC API, you can interact
even when in screensaver mode - just hold down the control key.
May 10, 2005
We finally have an installer and GUI for Mac OS X!
It is available as a development version,
and will become the standard version soon.
April 11, 2005
Volunteers have ported SETI@home and BOINC to
a variety of platforms,
including Solaris/x86-64, Linux/x86-64, Linux/PPC, HP-UX, and FreeBSD.
March 8, 2005
We released the BOINC Menubar, a user-friendly client software
version for Macintosh OS X.
It can be installed and run through a GUI interface -
no Unix commands.
We also released the Windows installer announced in
the January 1 2005 news item.
Both are available on the Download page.
February 19, 2005
The Einstein@home
project was officially launched this morning.
BOINC users are encouraged to participate in this project,
which searches for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars)
using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors.
February 17, 2005
We've added a framework for web-site translations
(both BOINC-supplied and project-specific parts).
We are adding support for
account management systems
that simplify participation in multiple projects.
Security enhancement: all application files are digitally signed.
January 20, 2005
BOINC source code is now distributed under the
Lesser GNU Public License (LPGL).
January 19, 2005
BOINC-based projects projects now have
80,721 participants in 188 countries.
Based on current credit statistics,
together they supply 106 TeraFLOPS of computing power -
far more than any conventional supercomputer.
January 18, 2005
BOINC's message board system supports moderation.
January 10, 2005
With help from the Einstein@home group, we have refined BOINC's
locality scheduling mechanism,
It can now interact with project-specific programs
that generate work on demand,
and that maintain a 'working set' of data files
for which work is distributed.
January 1, 2005
The Windows version of BOINC can now be configured
to run when a particular user is logged in,
to run when any user is logged in,
or run all the time (as a service)
even when no users are logged in.
December 10, 2004
With considerable help from the Einstein@home group,
we have application graphics working on all platforms, including Linux.
To handle hosts without graphics libraries,
we have developed a new architecture in which
graphics code resides in a dynamically loaded library.
December 6, 2004
Added prioritization to work distribution.
December 3, 2004
We have created a new email list,
boinc_cvs@ssl.berkeley.edu.
A summary of each CVS checkin to the BOINC source tree
will be posted to this list.
December 2, 2004
A technical paper about BOINC is
here.
This paper appeared in the
5th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Grid Computing,
November 8, 2004, Pittsburgh, USA.
November 21, 2004
We have developed a GUI for the core client.
It's similar to the old Windows GUI but is implemented
using wxWidgets
so it runs on all platforms.
It offers new features such as the ability to
suspend/resume projects and results,
and project-specific web links.
It uses a socket-based GUI RPC mechanism,
which makes it possible to develop other GUIs,
including ones that control many hosts.
November 21, 2004
A new utility, db_purge, allows projects to
flush old entries from the result and workunit tables,
so that these tables have a bounded size.
November 21, 2004
We have developed a new Windows installer
that lets you run BOINC as a service,
and that is compatible with the Microsoft MSI framework.
November 21, 2004
The application graphics framework now works on
all platforms, including Mac OS X.
November 21, 2004
The message-board system now supports self-moderation
(i.e., 'ignore lists').
November 21, 2004
BOINC servers can now use read-only database replicas
for increased throughput.
September 21, 2004
XML Schemas for the statistics data exported by BOINC projects
is here,
and graphical representations are
here.
September 14, 2004
We have created an email list, boinc_opt@ssl.berkeley.edu,
for people interested in porting and optimizing BOINC applications.
Sign up here.
September 11, 2004
We are working on a new type of work distribution, called
Locality scheduling,
that sends work to hosts that already have the needed files.
September 6, 2004
The Lattice project
from the University of Maryland
is developing a Grid system that integrates Globus,
BOINC, and several other software components.
September 1, 2004
The new project LHC@home announces its first beta test,
initially restricted to 1000 users.
Please sign up at lhcathome.cern.ch.
August 26, 2004
The Climateprediction.net
project is now open to the public.
August 6, 2004
Users can choose whether applications should
quit or suspend when they're not executing.
August 5, 2004
The core client now checks whether disk usage exceeds
user-specified limits, and if so it deletes projects files
in a way that respects project resource shares.
August 5, 2004
Large BOINC projects (like SETI@home) were getting
on the order of a million files in upload/download directories.
This caused OS performance problems.
We fixed this by providing a two-level directory
hierarchy for upload/download directories.
August 3, 2004
The Climateprediction.net project recently held an
Open Day,
describing its status and its plans to use BOINC.
July 9, 2004
We made the core/app interface more flexible and general,
providing better support for applications that consist
of separate controller, worker, and graphics programs.
We also added mechanisms that prevent
multiple applications from running in the same slot,
and that cause applications to exit if the core client dies.
July 9, 2004
We changed the SQL queries used by the performance-critical
server components, such as the transitioner and feeder,
to boost maximum server throughput.
July 9, 2004
The core client now does preemptive scheduling of results.
It time-slices between results,
maintaining the approximate project resource shares.
The work-fetch policy has also been modified;
a single 'connection frequency' parameter replaces the
min/max buffer parameter,
and the policy matches the requirements of the CPU-scheduling policy.
July 9, 2004
We have added a mechanism that allows projects to
upload and download 'persistent files'.
This is the first step to using participant hosts for storage
as well as computation, possibly creating
the world's largest storage server.
June 20, 2004
The statistics export mechanism has been redesigned
to give projects more control over what they export;
e.g. they can shift the burden of sorting to statistics web sites.
June 16, 2004
New features: support for multi-program applications.
Daily result quota per host.
Applications can supply a static graphic
(for screensaver) without writing code.
Improved support for FORTRAN.
Support for GUI RPCs in Windows client.
Option for allowing GUI RPCs from non-local hosts.
Check for keyboard/mouse input in Unix.
Support for name/password authentication for HTTP proxies.
May 31, 2004
BOINC news is available as an RSS feed;
see Community and Resources.
May 19, 2004
CPU benchmarking (and credit) are now based on
the Dhrystone and Whetstone benchmarks.
Memory bandwidth is no longer measured.
May 18, 2004
Source code is now available
directly via CVS.
Improved Unix signal handling.
Support app versions, workunits and results with lots of files
(changed XML fields from 4KB to 64KB).
Added
homogeneous redundancy mechanism.
May 2, 2004
General preferences are now propagated from client to server,
but only to accounts with the same email address
as where the preferences originated.
April 20, 2004
Added cross-project identification system.
Added support for caching of PHP web pages,
and restored leaderboard pages.
April 12, 2004
Recent fixes and features:
trickle messages
for long-running work units;
benchmarking for hyperthreaded CPUs;
don't propagate preferences from hosts to projects;
check for file existence before running apps;
SOCKS proxy support;
separate suspend/resume for network activity;
fix race conditions in server;
add file compression code.
See checkin_notes for details.
March 16, 2004
An unauthorized
BOINC graphic.
February 11, 2004
BOINC is being used at the Scripps Research Institute
to run a distributed version of CHARMM
(a program for macromolecular simulations).
February 1, 2004
BOINC now has an
anonymous platform mechanism
which 1) allows computers of any type to participate
in a BOINC project, and 2) allows participants to
run only software they have compiled themselves,
should they so desire.
January 22, 2004
The BOINC core client now provides
a set of RPCs allowing separate GUIs to be developed.
November 26, 2003
The CVS repository of BOINC code (including web pages) is now visible through
a web-based interface.
This may be useful for people maintaining web-site translations.
November 26, 2003
A paper
about the goals of BOINC was presented at a recent conference.
November 25, 2003
The beta test project is accepting new users.
CPU time measurement accuracy improved.
Scheduler respects disk usage limits.
Web site can issue cookies.
November 5, 2003
The graphics of running application are updated whenever
preferences are changed.
The scheduler now issues only as many results as will fit in
the allotted amount of disk space.
October 30, 2003
New minor versions of the core client and beta-test apps have been released.
XML statistics data for the beta test
is available;
it's intended for graphical or tabular representation.
October 18, 2003
A SETI@home application has been added to the beta test.
The scheduling server detect results that can't be sent
to any hosts, and flags them.
HTTP 404 errors on downloads are treated as unrecoverable.
Graphics can be limited by frame rate or percent of CPU.
Don't send two results from the same workunit to a single user.
Added JPEG support to application graphics.
Added "confirm before accept executable" mechanism.
September 11, 2003
BOINC is discussed in
an article by Joan Oleck in the New York TImes.
September 4, 2003
We've released BOINC version 2.0.
All BOINC components must be upgraded to major version 2.
We've upgraded the Astropulse server to 2.01 and
released BOINC core
client 2.01.
This was due to an architecture and protocol change in
specifying resource estimates and limits.
September 1, 2003
BOINC server tools are now Python-based. A database
back-end API allows quick development of data-manipulation utilities.
August 15, 2003
We rewrote parts of the scheduling server architecture to make operations
more flexible and efficient.
The timeout_check
daemon has been replaced by a more general transitioner daemon.
July 25, 2003
We've added two new web-site features for BOINC projects:
user profiles and message boards.
These are visible on the beta-test web site.
July 23, 2003
The BOINC source code is available again,
under a new public license.
Version 1.05 incorporates bug fixes and new features,
including the ability to add your own graphics to the screensaver.
The beta test has been resumed, and the scheduling server and
database have been moved to a new machine.
June 10, 2003
XML based statistics for
the Astropulse beta test are
available.
May 30, 2003
No big news to report,
but thanks to the beta test we've fixed a number of bugs,
involving runaway applications, too-large output files,
screensaver behavior, and mechanisms for
quitting and resetting projects.
April 29, 2003
We have created a second project, allowing beta testers to
experiment with dividing their resources between multiple projects.
April 23, 2003
We have resumed the BOINC beta test.
April 9, 2003
Due to a legal issue,
we are suspending the BOINC beta test,
and we have requested that BOINC source code
no longer be available at Sourceforge.net.
We hope to resolve this issue soon.
March 31, 2003
We are preparing a BOINC-based version of SETI@home.
See a preview of the graphics.
March 25, 2003
Non-English
language.ini files are available.
Preferences include time-of-day restrictions.
Core client and applications communicate via shared memory and signals
rather than files, reducing disk traffic.
March 19, 2003
New account parameters and preferences: URL, limit number of processors,
frequency of writes to disk, whether to show your computers on the web.
March 4, 2003
Participants can have separate preferences
(such as network and disk usage limits)
for computers at home, work, and school.
February 25, 2003
Participants can limit their upstream and downstream network bandwidth.
February 22, 2003
Participants can control the parameters (color, transparency,
timing) of the Astropulse graphics.
February 19, 2003
New feature: secure, verified email address update.
January 29, 2003
A screenshot of the
BOINC client running AstroPulse, our first test application.
December 10, 2002
We have started a beta test of BOINC using
the Astropulse application.
Many bugs have been found and fixed.
August 24, 2002
BOINC is under development.
The basic features are working on UNIX platforms.
We plan to release the first public application of BOINC later this year.
Return to BOINC main page
Last modified 10:08 PM UTC, April 16 2007.
Copyright © 2008 University of California.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License,
Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
The Africa@home workshop on volunteer computing with BOINC,
sponsored by the Geneva International Academic Network (GIAN),
was held recently at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Muizenberg, South Africa.
A growing number of 'skins' for the BOINC simple GUI are available
from crunching-family.at.
Here's an example.