Gerasim@home

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Gerasim@home
Project
StatusActive
CategoryDiscrete mathematics
ComputeCPU & GPU
RequiresBOINC
Development
DeveloperBOINC.ru community
AuthorSergey Valyaev
Initial releaseFebruary 1, 2008  (18 years ago)
Software
Written inC, C++, ASP.NET
Operating systemWindows, Linux
BOINC statistics
Stats as ofApril 11, 2026  (0 years ago)
Performance7.54 TFLOPS
Active users237
Total users8,279
Active hosts237
Total hosts13,438
Metadata
Websitehttps://gerasim.boinc.ru/
LicenseMixed / proprietary server infrastructure

Gerasim@home is a volunteer distributed computing project based on the BOINC platform. The project uses Internet-connected volunteer computers to perform research in discrete mathematics, combinatorial optimization, graph theory, Latin squares, and related computational problems.[1]

The project is one of the few long-running Russian BOINC projects and is operated through the BOINC.ru community.[2]

History

Gerasim@home began in test operation in February 2008.[3] The project was initially created to study distributed computing technologies and heuristic algorithms for solving combinatorial problems.[4]

A notable technical feature of the project was its server implementation using Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and ASP.NET instead of the more common Linux/Unix BOINC server stack.[5]

The project experienced several outages and maintenance interruptions over its lifetime, including extended downtime during 2025 before services resumed.[6]

Why Gerasim@home?

Many problems in discrete mathematics and combinatorial optimization require enormous computational resources due to the explosive growth of possible combinations. Problems involving Latin squares, graph partitioning, and heuristic search methods often become computationally infeasible on conventional single-computer systems.

Volunteer computing allows these problems to be divided into many smaller independent tasks and processed in parallel by thousands of volunteer computers worldwide.[7]

Goal

The project's primary goal is to investigate computational methods in discrete mathematics and optimization. Research topics have included:

  • Enumeration of diagonal Latin squares
  • Orthogonal diagonal Latin squares
  • Heuristic search algorithms
  • Graph partitioning problems
  • Parallel algorithm decomposition
  • Cube-and-conquer methods
  • Combinatorial optimization

The project also serves as a practical platform for studying large-scale distributed volunteer computing systems and algorithm scalability.

Construction of a fourth-order most-perfect magic square from a Latin square with distinct diagonals and its transpose by CMG Lee.

Methods

Gerasim@home distributes computational work units to volunteers using the BOINC middleware framework. Participants install the BOINC client software, attach to the project, and automatically receive tasks for processing.[8]

The project has historically focused on CPU-based computation but later added support for OpenCL GPU applications on NVIDIA and AMD hardware.[9]

As of 2026, project applications include:

  • Decic Fields (CPU)
  • Decic Fields (OpenCL NVIDIA)
  • Decic Fields (OpenCL AMD)

The project's infrastructure runs on Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server, which is relatively uncommon among BOINC projects.[10]

Applications

Decic Fields

The Decic Fields application is one of the active workloads distributed by the project. It is available for Windows and Linux platforms and supports CPU as well as OpenCL GPU computation.[11]

Project team / Sponsors

The project has been associated with the BOINC.ru volunteer computing community and contributors including:

  • Sergey Valyaev
  • Eduard Vatutin
  • Alexey Belyshev
  • Oleg Zaikin
  • Natalia Nikitina
  • Maxim Manzuk
  • Stepan Kochemazov

Several scientific publications connected with the project were produced in collaboration with Southwest State University and other Russian research institutions.

Server statistics

The project uses the BOINC volunteer computing platform.

According to the project's server status page, the infrastructure included over 8,000 registered users and more than 13,000 host computers as of April 2026.[12]

The project reported an average computing throughput of approximately 7.5 teraFLOPS.[13]

Scientific results

The project has contributed computational resources toward studies in combinatorics, Latin squares, graph theory, and heuristic optimization methods.

Research performed using Gerasim@home infrastructure has been presented at international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals related to supercomputing and high-performance computing.

Scientific publications

Research supported by Gerasim@Home computations has appeared in peer-reviewed publications on enumerative combinatorics, diagonal Latin squares, and volunteer-computing methods. The University of California, Berkeley maintains a catalogue of scientific publications arising, directly or indirectly, from BOINC-based computing, which lists the Gerasim@home papers below.[14] Papers whose computations ran in both Gerasim@Home and RakeSearch are listed on both project pages, with a note saying where the experiments were performed. Entries are ordered newest first; titles link to the publisher's version or to a full-text copy.

  1. Vatutin, E. I.; N. N. Nikitina; M. O. Manzyuk; I. I. Kurochkin; A. M. Albertyan (2024). On the number of transversals in diagonal Latin squares of even orders. Cloud and Distributed Computing Systems (ORVS-2023), National Supercomputing Forum (NSCF-2023), Pereslavl-Zalessky, pp. 101–105. (in Russian; shared with RakeSearch — order-9 experiments run in both projects on BOINC)
  2. Vatutin, Eduard I.; Alexey D. Belyshev; Natalia N. Nikitina; Maxim O. Manzuk (2023). Use of X-based diagonal fillings and ESODLS CMS schemes for enumeration of main classes of diagonal Latin squares. Telecommunications (1):2–16. DOI: 10.31044/1684-2588-2023-0-1-2-16. (in Russian; the number of main classes of diagonal Latin squares of order 9 was counted in Gerasim@Home)
  3. Vatutin, Eduard; Alexey Belyshev; Natalia Nikitina; Maxim Manzuk; Alexander Albertian; Ilya Kurochkin; Alexander Kripachev; Alexey Pykhtin (2023). Diagonalization and Canonization of Latin Squares. Supercomputing (RuSCDays 2023), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 14389:48–61. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-49435-2_4. (shared with RakeSearch — both projects named in the keywords and credited for the calculations)
  4. Vatutin, E. I.; N. N. Nikitina; M. O. Manzyuk; I. I. Kurochkin; A. M. Albertyan; A. V. Kripachev; A. I. Pykhtin (2023). Methods for constructing spectra of rapidly computable numerical characteristics of diagonal Latin squares. Cloud and Distributed Computing Systems in Electronic Management (ORVSEU-2022), National Supercomputing Forum (NSCF-2022), Pereslavl-Zalessky, pp. 19–23. (in Russian; shared with RakeSearch — order-13 spectrum computed in RakeSearch)
  5. Vatutin, E. I.; V. S. Titov; A. I. Pykhtin; A. V. Kripachev; N. N. Nikitina; M. O. Manzyuk; A. M. Albertyan; I. I. Kurochkin (2022). Estimation of the cardinalities of spectra of rapidly computable numerical characteristics of diagonal Latin squares of orders N>9. Science and Education in the Development of Industrial, Social and Economic Spheres of Russian Regions, Murom, pp. 118–119. (in Russian; computations and volunteer acknowledgements credit Gerasim@Home; also listed on the RakeSearch publications page)
  6. Vatutin, Eduard; Oleg Zaikin; Maxim Manzyuk; Natalia Nikitina (2021). Searching for Orthogonal Latin Squares via Cells Mapping and BOINC-Based Cube-and-Conquer. Supercomputing (RuSCDays 2021), Communications in Computer and Information Science 1510:498–512. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-92864-3_38. (shared with RakeSearch — ESODLS CMS search run in Gerasim@Home, Cube-and-Conquer stage in RakeSearch; both sets of volunteers thanked)
  7. Vatutin, Eduard; Alexey Belyshev (2020). Enumerating the Orthogonal Diagonal Latin Squares of Small Order for Different Types of Orthogonality. Supercomputing (RuSCDays 2020), Communications in Computer and Information Science 1331:586–597. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-64616-5_50. (shared with RakeSearch — enumeration run in Gerasim@Home, using row-permutation ODLS pairs found in RakeSearch)
  8. Vatutin, Eduard; Alexey Belyshev; Natalia Nikitina; Maxim Manzuk (2020). Evaluation of Efficiency of Using Simple Transformations When Searching for Orthogonal Diagonal Latin Squares of Order 10. High-Performance Computing Systems and Technologies in Scientific Research, Automation of Control and Production (HPCST 2020), Communications in Computer and Information Science 1304:127–146. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-66895-2_9.
  9. Vatutin, Eduard; Natalia Nikitina; Alexey Belyshev; Maxim Manzyuk (2020). On polynomial reduction of problems based on diagonal Latin squares to the exact cover problem. Information, Computation, and Control Systems for Distributed Environments (ICCS-DE 2020), CEUR Workshop Proceedings 2638:289–297. (computational experiments performed in Gerasim@Home on BOINC; also listed on the RakeSearch publications page)
  10. Vatutin, Eduard I.; Stepan E. Kochemazov; Oleq S. Zaikin; Maxim O. Manzuk; Natalia N. Nikitina; Vitaly S. Titov (2019). Central symmetry properties for diagonal Latin squares. Problems of Information Technology 10(2):3–8. DOI: 10.25045/jpit.v10.i2.01.
  11. Vatutin, Eduard; Alexey Belyshev; Stepan Kochemazov; Oleg Zaikin; Natalia Nikitina (2019). Enumeration of Isotopy Classes of Diagonal Latin Squares of Small Order Using Volunteer Computing. Supercomputing (RuSCDays 2018), Communications in Computer and Information Science 965:578–586. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-05807-4_49.
  12. Vatutin, Eduard; Oleg Zaikin; Stepan Kochemazov; Sergey Valyaev (2017). Using Volunteer Computing to Study Some Features of Diagonal Latin Squares. Open Engineering 7(1):453–460. DOI: 10.1515/eng-2017-0052.
  13. Vatutin, Eduard I.; Stepan E. Kochemazov; Oleg S. Zaikin (2017). Applying Volunteer and Parallel Computing for Enumerating Diagonal Latin Squares of Order 9. Parallel Computational Technologies (PCT 2017), Communications in Computer and Information Science 753:114–129. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-67035-5_9.
  14. Vatutin, Eduard; Stepan Kochemazov; Oleg Zaikin; Sergey Valyaev (2017). Enumerating the Transversals for Diagonal Latin Squares of Small Order. BOINC:FAST 2017, CEUR Workshop Proceedings 1973:6–14.

Hardware and software

The project supports multiple operating systems and architectures through the BOINC platform.

Supported platforms have included:

  • Windows x86_64
  • Linux x86_64
  • NVIDIA OpenCL GPUs
  • AMD OpenCL GPUs

The server infrastructure has operated on Microsoft Windows Server with Microsoft SQL Server database backends.[15]

Community

Gerasim@home maintains an international volunteer community through BOINC statistics services, teams, and forums. The project has participants from more than 100 countries.[16]

The project has also been discussed on BOINC community forums and Reddit, particularly during outages and infrastructure changes.[17]

See also

External links

Contributing

If you're interested in supporting this project, download and install BOINC and attach to the project using its official URL:

https://gerasim.boinc.ru/

Your computer will perform calculations and report results back to the project servers automatically.

  1. ↑ Gerasim@home. Gerasim@home. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  2. ↑ Проект Gerasim@Home. BOINC.RU. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  3. ↑ Gerasim@Home. Rechenkraft.net Wiki. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  4. ↑ Gerasim@Home. BOINC Wiki. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  5. ↑ Gerasim@Home. Russian Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  6. ↑ Project News. Gerasim@home. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  7. ↑ Vatutin, Eduard.(2017).Using Volunteer Computing to Study Some Features of Diagonal Latin Squares. Open Engineering. DOI: 10.1515/eng-2017-0052.
  8. ↑ BOINC official website. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  9. ↑ Applications. Gerasim@home. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  10. ↑ Gerasim@Home. Russian Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  11. ↑ Gerasim@home Applications. Gerasim@home. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  12. ↑ Server status. Gerasim@home. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  13. ↑ Server status. Gerasim@home. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  14. ↑ Scientific publications. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 2026-11-08.
  15. ↑ Server status. Gerasim@home. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  16. ↑ Gerasim@home. Gerasim@home. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
  17. ↑ Gerasim@Home - message boards not working. Reddit. Retrieved 2026-05-20.
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