BOINC - the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing - is a distributed computing platform that enables volunteers worldwide to contribute their idle computer resources to public-interest research projects. These projects span a range of disciplines, including astronomy, physics, biology, and climate science.

BOINC's importance lies in its ability to democratize access to high-throughput computing resources. By leveraging the collective power of thousands of volunteered computers, researchers can perform calculations and simulations that would otherwise be impossible due to limitations in funding and infrastructure.

Furthermore, BOINC facilitates collaboration between scientists and the public, allowing enthusiasts to directly contribute to cutting-edge research efforts. This democratization of scientific computing not only accelerates the pace of discovery but also fosters public engagement and education in science.

In essence, BOINC represents a powerful fusion of technology and community-driven collaboration, empowering individuals to make tangible contributions to advancing our understanding of the world around us.

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

• International

• Youth
• general public

BOINC is replicable by design: Any scientist or community with a compute-intensive question or challenge can set up a BOINC service to start aggregating volunteered resources.

This approach has been very successful: since the launch of BOINC in 2002 over 300 projects from researchers around the globe [1] have used BOINC to power their research, resulting in over 900 peer-reviewed publications [2]. In most cases, these are projects that would have been impossible within the economics of national high-performance computing resources or traditional cloud services.

Current work in the BOINC community is focused on making it even easier for scientists to get started with volunteered compute resources, and even easier for volunteers to participate.

[1] https://boincsynergy.ca/wiki/index.php/BOINC_projects
[2] https://boinc.berkeley.edu/pubs.php

While further research in this area is needed, there is strong reason to believe that volunteer computing is a highly green form of data processing.

First, volunteer computing leverages devices that are already powered up and active for other purposes. The extra power needed to run calculations on the processor is a small fraction of the total power used by a computer.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, when considering energy costs, one must take into account the full lifecycle energy cost of the computing device, which is not just the cost of each calculation, but also the cost to extract the raw materials, manufacture the device, ship the device, and later dispose of the device. These "non-use" costs are 66% of the total energy expense of owning and operating a typical computing device [1]. Thus, by using devices which have been acquired for other purposes, volunteer computing provides a considerable benefit in the total energy cost of computation.

[1] "Life Cycle of a Computer", University of Michigan, 2024. https://sustainablecomputing.umich.edu/knowledge/life-cycle.php

GLOBAL VALUES The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes people’s right to “share in scientific advancement and its benefits”. This goal is not being met at two levels: [1] the products of scientific advancement, and their benefits, are too often not equally distributed; [2] the tools for engaging in the scientific enterprise are likewise unevenly shared around the world, i.e. the means for producing such advancements are not equitably distributed. BOINC's community-powered approach to computational research addresses both these points: By enabling motivated communities to provide low-cost computing resources to public interest research around the world, we empower research that for a range of reasons might have difficulty accessing compute resources. And we at the same time open the door to public engagement in science. WSIS VALUES BOINC is social technology: The platform enables volunteers globally, regardless of their background or expertise, to meaningfully participate in– and learn about – research endeavors aligned with their values and interests: anyone with a computer and internet connection can participate, democratizing access to scientific collaboration and fostering a sense of community around common goals. At the same time, BOINCs permissionless structure means that researchers anywhere - regardless of location, institutional affiliation, and financial resources - can access supercomputing-scale resources. All that's needed is to convince a community of volunteers to run the BOINC application for their project. Finally, BOINC embodies a solution-oriented approach by leveraging distributed computing to address pressing scientific issues of public concern. Rather than waiting for traditional computing resources to become available (which in many cases would never happen, given the scale of computing required), BOINC enables researchers to take proactive steps towards solutions to some of the world's most significant challenges.