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 computers 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 540,130 active computers (hosts) worldwide processing on average 6.642 petaFLOPS as of October 2012. 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, Mac OS X and various Unix-like systems including GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. BOINC is free software which is released under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).
Read more about Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing: History, Design and Structure, BOINC Projects
Famous quotes containing the words berkeley, open and/or network:
“In short, if there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the very same reasons to think there were that we have now.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“It doesn’t do good to open doors for someone who doesn’t have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)