Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
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 435,000 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 557 TFLOPS as of August 6, 2007.[1] BOINC is funded by the National Science Foundation through awards SCI/0221529, SCI/0438443, and SCI/0506411.
The software is free/open source software, released under the GNU Lesser General Public License. It is also used for commercial usages, as there are some private companies that are beginning to use the platform to assist in their own research.[specify] The framework is supported by various operating systems: Windows (XP/2K/2003/NT/98/ME), Unix (GNU/Linux, FreeBSD) and Mac OS X.
[Source: Wikipedia]
Since the Graz University of Technology, Austria started theSHA-1 Collision Search Graz project, a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in cryptanalysis, members of CAcert participate in the BOINC research projects as well.
Projects
Currently the members of CAcert are engaged in the following projects:
Mathematics and Computing
Project Name |
Description |
ABC@home is a distributed computing project enabling a great search for so called abc-triples |
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Chess960 is a relatively young innovative chess variant. This project tries to combine Chess960 and the idea of distributed computing to inject some basics of theory to this chess variant |
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BOINC based Web Crawler |
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The purpose is to extend both theoretical and experimental results on collision generation for the MD5 and SHA1 hash functions |
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Prime Numbers are of great interest to mathematicians for a variety of reasons. Primes also play a central role in the cryptographic systems which are used for computer security. Through the study of Prime Numbers it can be shown how much processing is required to crack an encryption code and thus to determine whether current security schemes are sufficiently secure. |
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Solving problems related to graph theory |
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Attempting to solve the Riesel problem |
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Cryptoanalysis project, trying to find colliding SHA-1 messages |
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Searches for generalized binary number systems |
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Xtrem Lab is a BOINC project for measuring the free resources available on personal computers involved in large-scale distributed computing |
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yoyo@home is a wrapper of the distributed.net client and runs OGR work units. |
Physics and Astronomy
Project Name |
Description |
Einstein@Home is a program that uses your computer's idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors |
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General Classical Dynamics Grid for any scientist or science student Leiden University |
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Help scientists at CERN to simulate particles travelling in the Large Hadron Collider |
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Nano-Hive@Home is a distributed computing system used for large-scale nanotech systems simulation and analysis |
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Currently being used to test BOINC's forum software for possible use by another project |
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Study the structure and reactivity of molecules using Quantum Monte Carlo |
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Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) |
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Simulates the spin of atoms, protons or electrons, using the principles of quantum mechanics |
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Simulates two-phase flow in microgravity and microfluidics problems |
Biology and Medicine
Project Name |
Description |
redictor@home is a world-community experiment and effort to use distributed world-wide-web volunteer resources to assemble a supercomputer able to predict protein structure from protein sequence. Our work is aimed at testing and evaluating new algorithms and methods of protein structure prediction |
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Deduces DNA sequence, given a protein |
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Rosetta@home official alpha test project |
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To predict and design protein structures to fight diseases such as Cancer, Malaria, HIV and Alzheimer |
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Today, protein sequence comparison is the most powerful tool in computational biology for characterizing protein sequences because of the enormous amount of information that is preserved throughout the evolutionary process. SIMAP is a public database of pre-calculated protein similarities that plays a key role in many bioinformatics methods. It contains about all currently published protein sequences and is continuously updated |
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Superlink@Technion helps geneticists all over the world find disease-provoking genes causing some types of diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), cancer, schizophrenia and many others |
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To predict protein structures from DNA sequence |
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To integrate and deploy computing resources for scientific analysis |
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Advance our knowledge of human disease |
Climate Modeling
Project Name |
Description |
Examines the effects of atmospheric dispersion as it relates to the accuracy of measurements used in climate prediction |
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Tries to produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century |
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Recent extreme weather events have prompted the debate about effects of human activity on the world's climate. Now you can help us to determine the extent to which extreme weather events like the United Kingdom floods of Autumn 2000 are attributable to human-induced climate change. |
Rendering
Project Name |
Description |
BURP aims to develop a publicly distributed system for rendering 3D animations |
Not Categorized
Project Name |
Description |
Figure it out ... |
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Good question ... not sure what it is about ... |
Statistics
The following graphic shows our overall team progress within the different BOINC projects. It is updated once a day, so the actual numbers are a bit higher. It takes some time until all projects we are connected to are included. So stay tuned. For all those listed above, a CAcert team exists!
There is even a more detailed statistic and a ranking of the team members available, but again, it takes some time until all projects we are attached to will show up!
Quite often existing BOINC users look at the team info of the "top teams" of a project. So being one of the Top20 teams means more people will be aware of CAcert and our mission. So being a top team menas spreading the word a bit further. It would be great if we can hold such a position. Help us!
Founding a CAcert team
We will found teams on several projects within the next days. If you want to create a CAcert team inside a project were we do not yet have our own team, please use the following information:
Team name, text version:
CAcert
Team name, HTML version:
- None -
URL of team web page:
www.CAcert.org
Description of team:
It's been a long time coming, but the wait was worthwhile, finally you are able to get security at the right price... Free!
For years we've all been charged high amounts of money to pay for security that doesn't and shouldn't cost the earth.
Just visit our homepage!
Type of team:
Unclassified
Country:
International
Support
So far, we have no dedicated support team for BOINC. If you have any questions, just post them on the mailing lists!