I wrote the client and server in C++ and the web code in PHP. Mostly working in a cafe called The Beanery in Berkeley In a few months in late 2001 and early 2002, on a Linux laptop, I wrote the central part of BOINC - client, server, Web code. This time open source, with no profit motive. So in 2001 I quit UD, and started working on BOINC -Īnother volunteer computing infrastructure, UD hired some people who didn't like my approach My colleagues were (justifiably) skeptical about this,Ĭommuting between Berkeley and Austin TX,Īnd I developed an infrastructure for them. They wanted to hire me as CTO, and I needed a job. That wanted to develop such an infrastructure and monetize it. In 2000 I was approached by a startup company, United Devices (UD), I starting thinking about creating a general-purpose infrastructure On infrastructure issues (notably DB and server sysadmin) This meant separating the infrastructure from the science,Īlso, we found ourselves spending too much time We needed to be able to change the science code frequently, The infrastructure part (network communication,įetching and returning jobs, working invisibly in the background)Īnd the science part (the data analysis).Īll the volunteers had to download and install a new version of the program. Initially, was a single program, which included both Over 1000 years of computer time per day - mind-boggling. In 1998 we got the whole thing working, and we launched in May 1999.įor about a year we got tons of mass-media publicity,Īnd the number of volunteers soared to over a million. Two years eventually got some funding and we hired a few programmers.Įric Korpela joined and wrote the science code. We talked of forming an organization called "Big Science" that would coordinate volunteer computing,Īnd we briefly owned the domain ''. Physics, Earth Science, biomedicine, and so on. Looking for "technosignatures": synthetic signals coming from space.ĭan, Woody, me, Dave Gedye at 10th anniversary in 2009īut from the beginning, Gedye and I thought of volunteer computingĪs being of potential use in all areas of science. Together with Woody Sullivan and Dan Werthimer we the goal of using volunteer computing to analyze radio telescope data, Gedye conceived of the idea of volunteer computing, We became running partners, and have been fast friends (ha ha) ever since. He was a Teaching Assistant in my Operating Systems class. from 1985 to 1992.ĭavid Gedye was a graduate student there. If there's an omission or factual error, please let me know.ĭavid Gedye and taught in the UC Berkeley Computer Science Dept. This essay documents the history of BOINC from my perspective.Īnd offers some theories about why things happened as they did.īut mostly about people: personalities, aspirations, and conflicts. Is an important chapter in the history of science. Hence I think that volunteer computing - and BOINC in particular. To involve the worldwide public directly in science, It has been used by about 50 projects in many areas of science,Ĭomputing has emerged as a central tool in every area of science.īOINC sought to expand this tool by orders of magnitude, Their home computers and smartphones to science research projects. Is a software system for "volunteer computing": We're watching everything closely.Thanks to Mike McLennan and others for edits. TLDR: our crunchers consume jobs at a rate at least one order of magnitude higher than our other computing venues, so it stresses all the infrastructure. We are tiptoeing back into the creation of WUs. That server is critical for all nanoHUB jobs, including courses at several universities, so the DB upgrade had to be thoroughly tested before rolling it out. The database of in-progress jobs (via BOINC and other venues) was consuming all the memory on that machine, leading to swapping. The WU's are created from nanoHUB input files by another server, and we had to do significant upgrades to that server. ![]() We had to upgrade the BOINC server in January to support the volume of WUs our crunchers consume. The BOINC server for this project is connected to several other key parts of the nanoHUB infrastructure. We had to temporarily halt WU production while we fix the other machine. We're having trouble with a nanoHUB server that sends jobs to the BOINC server for WU production. We saved all the results and set up a new dedicated machine to handle that part of the work flow. A nanoHUB machine that handled results returned from the BONIC server froze, stranding 100k successfully completed results, along with some live nanoHUB sessions. This move potentially will cause intermittent interruption of service for the next several days. The server is moving to a new physical location.
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