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BOINC: A Platform for Volunteer Computing

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  • Published: 16 November 2019
  • Volume 18, pages 99–122, (2020)
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BOINC: A Platform for Volunteer Computing
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  • David P. Anderson  ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3155-78831 

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Abstract

“Volunteer computing” is the use of consumer digital devices for high-throughput scientific computing. It can provide large computing capacity at low cost, but presents challenges due to device heterogeneity, unreliability, and churn. BOINC, a widely-used open-source middleware system for volunteer computing, addresses these challenges. We describe BOINC’s features, architecture, implementation, and algorithms.

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Acknowledgements

Many people contributed to the ideas presented here and to their implementation. Thanks in particular to Bruce Allen, Nicolás Alvarez, Matt Blumberg, Karl Chen, Carl Christensen, Charlie Fenton, David Gedye, Francois Grey, Eric Korpela, Janus Kristensen, John McLeod VII, Kevin Reed, Ben Segal, Michela Taufer, and Rom Walton. The National Science Foundation has supported BOINC with several grants, most recently award #1664190.

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  1. Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA

    David P. Anderson

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  1. David P. Anderson
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Correspondence to David P. Anderson.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

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Cite this article

Anderson, D.P. BOINC: A Platform for Volunteer Computing. J Grid Computing 18, 99–122 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-019-09497-9

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  • Received: 21 December 2018

  • Accepted: 20 October 2019

  • Published: 16 November 2019

  • Issue Date: March 2020

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10723-019-09497-9

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Keywords

  • BOINC
  • Volunteer computing
  • Distributed computing
  • Scientific computing
  • High-throughput computing
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