Linking computers for science

After the success of SETI@home, many other scientists have found computer power donated by the public to be a valuable resource - and sometimes the only possibility to achieve their goals. In July, representatives of several “public resource computing” projects came to CERN to discuss technical issues and R&D activities on the common computing platform they are using, BOINC.


This photograph shows the LHC@home screen-saver which uses the BOINC platform: the dots represent protons and the position of the status bar indicates the progress of the calculations.


This summer, CERN hosted the first “pangalactic workshop” on BOINC (Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing). BOINC is modelled on SETI@home, which millions of people have downloaded to help search for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence in radio-astronomical data. BOINC provides a general-purpose framework for scientists to adapt their software to, so that the public can install and run it. An important part of BOINC is managing the credit that participants earn, which encourages competition between individuals and teams, and is a major part of the attraction for many participants.

The workshop was attended by representatives of a variety of BOINC projects, such as SETI@home, ClimatePrediction.Net, and Einstein@home, and by people planning new projects such as a quantum chromodynamics project (University of Saragossa) and a project to model different methods for curbing the spread of malaria in Africa (Swiss Tropical Institute). After reviewing technical issues of common interest, R&D on the BOINC platform was discussed, including new ideas such as using BOINC for distributed storage or how BOINC and Grid technologies could be integrated.

BOINC is used for the LHC@home project run by CERN, where 5000 users are running the programme Sixtrack to study the stability of the beam in the LHC. LHC@home has recently been delivering over 2 Teraflops, representing the computational power of over 1000 PCs. As some of the other participants at the workshop were able to demonstrate, this is just the tip of the iceberg: climateprediction.net recently published a study of climate models where over 90 000 public PCs were used; Einstein@home has more than 50 000 active users to analyse data from the gravity wave detector LIGO.

The workshop participants agreed that public resource computing is not only a way to tap into unused resources, but also an outreach activity to involve the public in cutting-edge research. The donors show great interest in the projects; some even provide technical support, debugging the programme and suggesting or developing new functionalities. Conclusions from the workshop included the need to make BOINC easier to deploy for other scientists and easier to install for the public. There was also consensus to establish BOINC project guidelines, for example to encourage the scientific results from the projects to be made publicly available, in order to ensure continued public support.