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:
“Upon the whole I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all of those difficulties, which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to our selves. That we have raised a dust, and then complain that we cannot see.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“The poorest children in a community now find the beneficent kindergarten open to them from the age of two-and-a-half to six years. Too young heretofore to be eligible to any public school, they have acquired in their babyhood the vicious tendencies of their own depraved neighborhoods; and to their environment at that tender age had been due the loss of decency and self-respect that no after example of education has been able to restore to them.”
—Virginia Thrall Smith (1836–1903)
“How have I been able to live so long outside Nature without identifying myself with it? Everything lives, moves, everything corresponds; the magnetic rays, emanating either from myself or from others, cross the limitless chain of created things unimpeded; it is a transparent network that covers the world, and its slender threads communicate themselves by degrees to the planets and stars. Captive now upon earth, I commune with the chorus of the stars who share in my joys and sorrows.”
—Gérard De Nerval (1808–1855)