GridRepublic and BOINC |
GridRepublic is built using BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), and was developed in collaboration with the BOINC team.
BOINC is a widely used middleware for Volunteer Computing, originally developed for SETI@home, the world's first large scale Volunteer Computing project.
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History
In 1999, the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California at Berkely launched SETI@home, which became the world's first large scale Volunteer Computing project. In the wake the project's considerable success, the developers began working on an "abstract" version of the SETI software, intended as a general purpose platform for scientific computing. This software became BOINC (The Berkeley Open Infrastucure for Network Computing).
As successful as it was in the years following its initial release, growth of the BOINC platform was-- and continues to be-- limited by a few key factors. First and foremost, most people have not heard of it. And if they have heard of BOINC or Volunteer Computing generally, any impulse to investigate tends to be squelched (1) by the mistaken impression that the endeavor is limited to SETI, and/or (2) by a lack of knowledge as to where to go to learn more, and/or (3) by an assumption that participation requires a high degree of technical competence.
The idea behind GridRepublic is to address all the above constraints: to provide a central portal listing available projects, along with descriptive information for each; and to integrate this with a simplified user interface, making everything point-and-click easy. Finally, we aspire to build a community and to engage in active outreach, with the objective of educating the mainstream public of the possibilities.
In November 2004 we began work with the BOINC team to extend the feature set of BOINC to make such a portal possible. The public beta test for GridRepublic was opened in the summer of 2006.
GridRepublic Desktop vs BOINC
The GridRepublic Desktop software is built from the same code as the BOINC desktop software. It is slightly customized, (1) to simplify installation and integration with GridRepublic's management features, and (2) to improve the graphical appearance of the software.
It is possible to use generic BOINC desktop software with GridRepublic: upon creation of an account the system will detect preexisting BOINC accounts and give appropriate instructions to "attach" generic BOINC clients to GridRepublic.
Projects
All the projects available through GridRepublic run BOINC server software. As noted in the footer of most every page, all projects are independently conceived, developed and maintained. GridRepublic is an outreach organization, not a research organization: our goal is to find, educate, and recruit potential users-- to build the volunteer pool necessary to the success of volunteer computing and to provide a kind of "matchmaking" service for users and projects.
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