BOINC, which was a popular project in the 90s, is now heading for a strong comeback with its developers now targeting Android devices. Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, or BOINC, is a platform that lets volunteers from around the world donate their unused processing power for collaborative tasks. Based on a suggestion by a student, David Anderson, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, initiated BOINC in 1995 to support his project SETI@home. This platform, which also supports other projects, managed to have more than a million machines on its network in the late 90s, but the number gradually declined to 400,000 at present.
For the last six months, Anderson and his team have been working on the BOINC software to enable it to run on both smartphones and tablets. The rapid evolution of mobile devices to include powerful CPUs and graphics processors has helped the team tremendously as recent smartphones can be efficiently used to feed Berkeley’s massively distributed system.
This has not been the first time that Android has been tried and tested for a similar project. A few years ago, a group of students came out with the ‘BOINCOID’ project that tried to migrate the BOINC engine to Google’s open source operating system. Their goal was to enable computers, phones and refrigerators to be a part of the project. Unfortunately the project failed as the platform could not function efficiently in real time.
The reason behind the second attempt at Android devices after five years since the failure of BOINCOID is because of the popularity of crowd-sourced projects and the Android platform, which now runs in about half a billion devices. Anderson stated that in the next few months, the team would begin distributing BOINC apps that will help analyze data for the project Einstein@Home that attempts to find pulsars, black holes and gravitational waves. The apps will also be used to feed other projects that run on IBM’s World Community Grid.
Only Android has been targeted for now because the code that the app runs on taps into basic processor functions at the heart of the mobile device. Apps on iOS run in a highly sandboxed environment, which led the team to discard the platform as a viable option, especially since Apple does not believe in principles of openness and transparency which lie at the heart of the BOINC project. The BOINC team has clarified that running the app will not result in excessive battery or data drain as data-crunching will take place only when the gadget is charging and connected to a Wi-Fi network.
