Your PC gets a set of tasks from the project’s scheduling server.Classic - Improve the design of the CERN LHC particle acceleratorĪs described on the project’s wiki and illustrated below, this is how the distributed BOINC computing platform works.SIMAP - Protein sequence comparison to support manifold biological research.PrimeGrid - Search for mega primes and special form numbers.Climate Prediction - Study climate change.- Study the gravitational potential of the Milky way.computation time, memory requirements, checkpointing interval, report limit) - a non-intensive project that collects workunits properties of BOINC projects (e.g.- Help researchers develop cures for human diseases.World Community Grid - Runs multiple sub-projects that focus on humanitarian research including HIV/AIDS, cancer, dengue fever, malaria, or developing more nutritious rice and affordable clean energy.- Search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars.
- Look for radio evidence of extraterrestrial life.Here’s the current top-10 list of distributed computing projects competing for users’ idle computing resources… Those who volunteer their computers’ idle cycles to the cause can choose among a long list of projects, of which remains the most popular. And now it’s arrived on Android.Ĭurrently, BOINC’s distributed computing infrastructure has more than two million volunteer participants, resulting in an aggregate average processing capability of about 7.2 petaFLOPS. Eventually, the BOINC project broadened its scope and opened up its infrastructure to a diverse range of applications (more on that below).
What if their idle CPU cycles could be harnessed for the good of humanity? With that in mind, the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) project has just launched its first official Android app.īasically, BOINC is a distributed computing framework developed by researchers at the University of California Berkeley-based Space Sciences Laboratory, to tap into the idle compute cycles of millions of volunteers’ PCs and apply that enormous aggregate resource to analyzing data collected by the nonprofit, NASA-sponsored SETI Institute. With half a billion Android smartphones shipping worldwide in 2012 alone, it’s hardly a stretch to imagine that the global population of Android devices is nearing one billion. Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Pinterest Email