BOINC story in Nature Index
A story in Nature Index discusses volunteer computing.
US supercomputer needs more people power
A large computing network that has helped design cancer drug candidates and search for extra-terrestrial life is struggling to maintain its volunteer network.
22 February 2017
Ivy Shih
A citizen science initiative that encourages public donations of idle computer processing power to run complex calculations is struggling to increase participation.
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), a large grid that harnesses volunteered power for scientific computing, has been running for 15 years to support research projects in medicine, mathematics, climate change, linguistics and astrophysics.
But, despite strong demand by scientists for supercomputers or computer networks that can rapidly analyse high volumes of data, the volunteer run BOINC has struggled to maintain and grow its network of users donating their spare computer power. Of its 4 million-plus registered users, only 6% are active, a number that has been falling since 2014.
“I'm constantly looking for ways to expose sectors of the general population to BOINC and it's a struggle,” says David Anderson, a co-founder and computer scientist at the University of California Berkeley.
Full article at Nature Index
BOINC story in Nature Index
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