Introduction to BOINC

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a software platform for public-participation distributed computing projects like distributed.net and SETI@home. BOINC supports applications that can be divided into large parallel parts with few data dependencies; it is not presently intended for fine-grained parallel applications.

The features of BOINC include:

• Multiple Independent Projects
  BOINC allows multiple independent projects to share participants. Participants download a single core client program, which in turn downloads and executes project-specific executables. Participants can control how their resources are divided among the projects and which projects they participate in. Participants may also control how many applications are running at once, thereby taking advantage of multiple CPU systems. Since the projects are independent, any downtime for one project will merely result in temporary extra processing power for another.
  
  
• Comprehensive Security
  All file transfers to the host computer are validated with an MD5 checksum, and all executable files are signed with RSA public/private key encryption (1024 bit default). See the security page for more details.
  
  
• Host Work Caching
  The BOINC core client will download enough work to keep the host busy for a user specifiable amount of time. This will allow the client to continue to function during project downtimes, as well as decrease the frequency of connections to servers.
  
  
• Multiple Platform Support
  The BOINC core client can run on almost any platform (Mac OS X, Windows 95 and later, Linux and other Unix systems) and provides OpenGL based graphics support on Mac OS X, Windows 95 and up, and X Windows.
  
  
• Multiple Server Support
  The BOINC architecture supports multiple scheduling and data servers. If one server is temporarily unavailable, clients will automatically try alternate servers. If all servers are unavailable, clients will perform random exponential backoff to avoid flooding the server.
  
  
• Open Source
  BOINC is fully open source and is distributed under the Mozilla Public License version 1.0. Under this license, projects that utilize BOINC are not required to release the source code of their project specific applications, though they are encouraged to do so. This means BOINC is well suited for private, commercial, or public distributed computing projects.
  
  
• Support for Large Data Computations
  BOINC supports applications that produce or consume large amounts of data (on the order of gigabytes). It allows data distribution and collection to be spread across many servers, and it allows participant hosts to do large data transfers unobtrusively. Users are able to specify maximum storage usage so that BOINC doesn't fill up their disk. BOINC also handles network disconnections and allows user-specifiable network bandwidth restrictions.
  
  
• Extreme Resource Requirement Support
  BOINC supports applications with extreme requirements for memory, disk, cache or other resources. Work is dispatched only to hosts able to handle it.
  
  
• Application Program Interface
  An Application Program Interface (API) is provided to application developers to ease integration with BOINC. See the API page for details.
  
  
• Support for Applications in any Language
  BOINC applications can be developed in any language (C++, Fortran, Perl). An application can consist of several files (e.g. multiple programs and a coordinating script). New versions of applications can be deployed without requiring participants to download.
  
  
• Web Based User and Administrative Interfaces
  A set of PHP scripts is included to provide interfaces for user and administrative tasks. These include preference editing, account creation and user information display.
  
  
• Database and Server Architecture
  BOINC provides a SQL schema, database functions, a simple server architecture, web based user interfaces and server administration tools. Each project must provide and maintain its own server systems and backend result processing but these systems can be set up easily and require only open-source components (MySQL, PHP, Apache, and Linux). The BOINC scheduling server also supports FastCGI for enhanced server performance.