Distributed computing: a brief introduction to BOINC projects

Here, many have heard about the BOINC distributed computing program, perhaps many even take part in it. This article is intended primarily for those who have not heard about this project, but may be interested in them. Here I will give brief descriptions of the most popular projects.

BOINC is a software package for quick organization of distributed computing. Consists of server and client parts. Originally developed for the largest voluntary computing project, SETI @ home, but later developers at the University of California at Berkeley made the platform available for third-party projects. Today BOINC is a universal platform for projects in the field of mathematics, molecular biology, medicine, astrophysics and climatology. BOINC gives researchers the opportunity to tap the enormous computing power of personal computers from around the world.

The bottom line is that this program allows various research, educational institutions or just science enthusiasts to find help from people who are willing to share processor time with them. A task that requires significant computing power is broken down into simpler parts and sent to different people, if the solution is correct for its part — the project server charges a certain number of points to the participant.
Many participants are organized in teams and organize competitions among themselves in various projects.

Briefly portray this process as follows:
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Currently, there are about 300,000 active participants in the BOINC network, giving a total of more than 9 million computers and a performance of more than 8 petaflops (at the time of this writing).

List of projects
Here you can see statistics on all active projects.

SETI @ home

SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a field of science whose goal is to find intelligent extraterrestrial life. One method, known as radio SETI, is to use radio telescopes to receive narrowband signals from space. Signals that are not characteristic of natural phenomena, will serve as evidence of the use of extraterrestrial technology.

Previously, TAC projects used special supercomputers located near the telescope to analyze the incoming information. In 1995, David Ghedi proposed using a large number of home computers connected to the Internet as a virtual supercomputer for analyzing radio signals. To explore this idea, he organized the SETI @ home project. The SETI @ home project was launched in May 1999.

Rosetta @ home

The Rosetta @ home project aims to calculate the three-dimensional structure of proteins. Such studies can lead to the creation of drugs for diseases such as HIV, malaria, cancer and Alzheimer's disease.

More information on the goals and methods of this project can be found here .

WorldCommunityGrid

This project was launched by IBM with the goal of making calculations in various fields of science: deciphering the human genome, developing a drug for the Ebola virus, mapping chemical markers of various types of cancer, as well as research in the field of renewable energy sources.

List of completed projects

Einstein @ home

Einstein @ Home aims to locate pulsars using data from the Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observatory ( LIGO ), Arecibo radio telescope , the Fermi Space Gamma Telescope ( GLAST ).

The signal that proved the existence of gravitational waves was too short to be processed by the project, but now the data are being prepared for a new search for long-lasting gravitational waves all over the sky.

Climate Prediction

The project calculates various simulations of climate models, which allows you to predict how the weather will change on Earth in the future.

Malaria control

The project uses computer resources for stochastic modeling of the epidemiology and natural history of malaria caused by Plasmodium falciparum .

MilkyWay @ Home

The project aims to create highly accurate three-dimensional models of the Strelets Flow , which provides information on how the Milky Way was formed and how tidal arms are formed during the collision of galaxies.

LHC @ Home

The SixTrack subproject, designed to help scientists improve the work of the LHC, calculates various trajectories of 60 particles, in which the beam will remain stable in the accelerator. The number of cycles from 100,000 to a million cycles, which corresponds to less than 10 seconds of real time. This is enough to check whether the beam will maintain the trajectory for a much longer time or there is a risk of loss of beam stability, which can lead to serious problems in reality, for example, to stop the accelerator or to failure of some detectors.

PrimeGrid

The project aims to find a special type of primes. A complete list of subprojects can be found on the official website.

Asteroids @ home

The project aims to increase the amount of information about the physical characteristics of asteroids. The program processes the data of photometric observations by different instruments at different times. This information is converted by the light curve inversion method, which allows you to create a 3D model of the asteroid shape along with the definition of the period and the direction of rotation around its axis.

Since the data from photometric observations are usually stretched in time, the rotation period is not “visible” directly. A large amount of parameters should be checked to determine the optimal solution. In such cases, the inversion of the light curve takes too much time and distributed calculations - the only way to effectively deal with the photometry of hundreds and thousands of asteroids. In addition, to detect errors in the method and reconstruct the true physical parameters of the asteroids, it is necessary to process a large amount of data on "synthetic" objects.

The study of the shape and other parameters of the asteroids will allow us to learn more about their real sizes, whether they are a real threat, and further help to determine suitable targets for research missions.



Base 3D-models of asteroids

Cosmology @ Home

The project aims to find the model that best describes our Universe, and to find which group of models confirms the current data obtained by theoretical cosmological studies and practical physical observations.

Yoyo @ home

The project consists of five subprojects, each of which is a project for finding solutions to various theoretical issues: from finding odd odd numbers to a project on modeling the work of a muon collider .

POEM @ Home

The project is aimed at modeling protein folding , which will further help to more accurately determine the function of proteins by their structure. Such knowledge can help in medical research.

theSkyNet POGS

This is an astronomical research project of processing data from various telescopes of the world in different ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum. The project combines GALEX , Pan-STARRS1 and WISE to create a multi-frequency (ultraviolet-optical-infrared spectra) atlas of our closest neighborhoods of the Universe. The project determines the physical parameters (the stellar mass of galaxies, the absorption of radiation by dust, the mass of the dust component, the star formation rate) for each pixel using the optimum search technique for the distribution of spectral energy .

GPUGRID

Molecular simulations performed by the project are one of the most frequent when scientists work, but they are also one of the most resource-intensive, so a supercomputer is usually used to calculate them. As in other biological projects of BOINC, GPUGRID uses computer resources to simulate proteins for a better understanding of their structure and the development of drugs for various diseases.

Useful links:

BOINC versions for different OS
Github
BOINC Wiki
Russian site