Design and Structure
BOINC is designed to be a free structure for anyone wishing to start a volunteer computing project. Most BOINC projects are nonprofit and rely heavily, if not completely, on volunteers.
In essence BOINC is software that can use the unused CPU and GPU cycles on a computer to do scientific computing—what one individual does not use of his/her computer, BOINC uses. In late 2008, BOINC's official website announced that NVIDIA (a leading GPU manufacturer) had developed a system called CUDA that uses GPUs for scientific computing. With NVIDIA's assistance, some BOINC-based projects (e.g., SETI@home, MilkyWay@home) now have applications that run on NVIDIA GPUs using CUDA. Beginning in October 2009, BOINC added support for the ATI/AMD family of GPUs also. These applications run from 2x to 10x faster than the former CPU-only versions. In 7.x.x preview versions, GPU support (via OpenCL) was added for computers using Mac OS X with AMD Radeon graphic cards.
BOINC consists of a server system and client software that communicate with each other to distribute, process, and return workunits.
Read more about this topic: Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing
Famous quotes containing the words design and/or structure:
“Joe ... you remember I said you wouldn’t be cheated?... Nobody is really. Eventually all things work out. There’s a design in everything.”
—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)
“The structure was designed by an old sea captain who believed that the world would end in a flood. He built a home in the traditional shape of the Ark, inverted, with the roof forming the hull of the proposed vessel. The builder expected that the deluge would cause the house to topple and then reverse itself, floating away on its roof until it should land on some new Ararat.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)