Ibercivis

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Ibercivis
Ibercivis BOINC screensaver
Project
StatusCompleted
CategoryMulti-Application
ComputeCPU
RequiresNone
Development
DeveloperSpanish National Research Council and Ibercivis Foundation
AuthorInstitute of Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI), University of Zaragoza
SponsorIbercivis Foundation
Initial releaseJune 20, 2008  (18 years ago)
CompletedAugust 1, 2020  (6 years ago)
Software
Operating systemWindows, Linux, macOS
BOINC statistics
Stats as ofMay 16, 2020  (6 years ago)
Performance13.936 TFLOPS
Active users917
Total users924
Active hosts2,375
Total hosts2,383
Metadata
Websitehttps://boinc.ibercivis.es

Ibercivis was a volunteer computing platform that allowed internet users to donate idle computer cycles to scientific research through BOINC. Based in Spain and developed in cooperation with Portuguese institutions, Ibercivis ran a wide variety of applications spanning nuclear fusion research, protein docking, materials science, number theory, and the social sciences, before its original incarnation was discontinued and the platform was briefly revived in 2020 to support drug-screening efforts against SARS-CoV-2.[1]

The project's name is a portmanteau of "Iberia" and the Latin word civis, meaning "citizen."[1]

History

Ibercivis traces its roots to Zivis, a local volunteer computing project developed by BIFI and funded by the ayuntamiento (city council) of Zaragoza, which began operating in 2007.[1][2] Zivis was sponsored by the Zaragoza city council together with Telefónica, Endesa, Ibercaja, the Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation, and the University of Zaragoza.[3]

Building on Zivis, Ibercivis was officially presented at the headquarters of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid on 20 June 2008, with the research areas of its first three applications being nuclear fusion, protein folding, and materials simulations.[2][1] The project was developed with the cooperation of the Institute of Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems (BIFI) at the University of Zaragoza, the Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas (CIEMAT), CETA-CIEMAT, CSIC, and RedIris, positioning Ibercivis as a European counterpart to SETI@home and the broader BOINC ecosystem.[1]

In July 2009, following an agreement signed at the Luso-Spanish Summit held in Zamora, Spain in January 2009, the platform was extended into Portugal.[1] Several Portuguese institutions subsequently joined, including the Portuguese Ministry of Science, the Centre for Neuroscience and Cell Biology at the University of Coimbra, and the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Experimental Particle Physics (LIP).[1]

At its June 2008 launch, Ibercivis had around 3,000 registered users.[1] By December 2012 this had grown to over 19,800 users across 124 countries, with roughly 55,000 registered hosting devices, of which more than 3,600 were active weekly.[1] An organizational profile from the era described the project as having attracted close to 30,000 users since its 2008 launch, with around 3,000 contributing computing power on a daily basis, drawing participating research groups from Spain, Portugal, Argentina, and Mexico.[3]

On 14 November 2011, Ibercivis was formally established as a private, non-profit foundation at CSIC's Madrid headquarters.[2] The founding entities of the Ibercivis Foundation were the University of Zaragoza, CIEMAT, CSIC, the Government of Aragon, the Zaragoza City of Knowledge Foundation, the Ikerbasque Foundation, the public business entity Red.es, and Spain's Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness.[2] The Foundation went on to describe itself as having deployed more than 60 experiments from 40 different research groups, reaching over 60,000 citizen scientists across volunteer computing, volunteer sensing, and participatory-experiment formats.[4]

The original BOINC platform was intended to run indefinitely as a multi-application project in the style of World Community Grid, allowing users to choose which research applications to support.[1] By 2020, however, the original boinc.ibercivis.es server had gone dark, with its SSL certificate expired and no work being distributed; community discussion on BOINC statistics forums called for the project to be formally retired.[5]

COVID-Phym relaunch

In April 2020, the Ibercivis Foundation and CSIC relaunched the platform under a new project, COVID-Phym, to screen existing approved drugs for antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.[1] The relaunch reset the user database, requiring volunteers to register new accounts rather than carrying over statistics from the original platform.[6] As of the relaunch in May 2020, this "Ibercivis 2" incarnation reported 917 active users and 2,375 active hosts.[1] No new work was distributed after roughly August 2020, and the project's certificate again lapsed not long afterward, effectively ending the platform's BOINC operations.[5]

Completed and discontinued applications

Over its operating life, Ibercivis hosted a wide range of scientific applications contributed by research groups across Spain, Portugal, Argentina, and Mexico.[1][3] Applications that were completed or discontinued by May 2020 included:[1]

  • Fusion ("a star on your screen") — simulated the plasmas expected in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), supporting scientists at CIEMAT's National Fusion Laboratory and BIFI. The application contributed computing time toward modeling charged-particle transport and confinement in the Spanish TJ-II stellarator, among other magnetic-confinement fusion research.[1][7]
  • Docking ("looking for anti-cancer drugs") — simulated protein docking to search for new medicines, developed by the Bioinformatics Unit of the Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa (CSIC-UAM), with the goal of finding effective treatments for diseases such as cancer. (See also: Docking@Home, an unrelated BOINC project pursuing similar goals at the University of Delaware.)[1]
  • Materials ("simulation of magnetic systems") — aided physicists at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Universidad de Extremadura, and BIFI in studying how non-magnetic impurities affect the magnetic-to-non-magnetic phase transition in materials, with applications to magnetic hard disks and superconductors.[1]
  • Nanoluz ("light at a nanoscale") — investigated how light interacts with metal nanoparticles at scientists at the Institute of Optics Daza Valdés (CSIC), with potential applications in solar panels and medical and biological analysis.[1]
  • IberNet ("let's research inside Ibercivis") — studied the structure of the Ibercivis volunteer base itself as a social network, aiming to apply the findings to the study of large-scale social dynamics more broadly.[1]
  • Amiloide — searched digital compound libraries for candidate drugs that could interfere with the amyloid aggregation implicated in neurodegenerative diseases, principally familial amyloid polyneuropathy and Alzheimer's disease. The project was led by the Structural and Computational Biology Group at the Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC), University of Coimbra.[1]
  • Neurosim ("an immersion in the molecular structure of memory") — analyzed the structural properties of amino acids and small peptides active in the human brain and nervous system, run by scientists at the Institute of Matter Structure, CSIC, by simulating the energy landscape of individual amino acids.[1]
  • Adsorption — studied the adsorption properties of pillared clays used as industrial catalysts and gas-storage materials, on behalf of researchers at the Instituto de Química-Física Rocasolano, CSIC.[1]
  • Cuanticables ("quantic wires simulations") — used by scientists at the University of Buenos Aires to model how material defects in quantum wires affect the electric current passing through them.[1]
  • Sanidad ("improved diagnostics") — supported physicists in Andalusia studying the safe medical use of ionizing radiation in diagnostics and radiotherapy.[1]
  • Criticalidad — helped Mexican researchers study electron transport through disordered systems exhibiting fractal properties near the Anderson localization transition.[1]
  • Soluvel — calculated solvation energies of compounds to identify potential toxicity or pharmaceutical value, run by the Laboratory of Molecular Simulation of Separation and Reaction Engineering (LSRE) at the University of Porto.[1]
  • Primalidad ("search for Wilson primes") — an open citizen-science mathematics application that searched for the next Wilson prime after the only three known at the time, 5, 13, and 563.[1] A Wilson prime is a prime p satisfying
p2∣(p−1)!+1
It was conjectured at the time that any fourth Wilson prime would have to exceed 5×108.[1]

Active applications (2020 relaunch)

As of May 2020, the relaunched platform ran a single active application:[1]

  • COVID-Phym — screened existing approved drugs for antiviral activity against SARS-CoV-2.[1]

Scientific publications

Scientific publications

Ibercivis-related computing has contributed to peer-reviewed research across physics, chemistry, biomedicine, and citizen-science methodology. A comprehensive, continually updated bibliography of papers arising from BOINC-based computing across all projects, including Ibercivis, is maintained at the official BOINC publications page.[8] Selected publications include:

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 1.23 1.24 1.25 1.26 1.27 1.28 1.29 Ibercivis. Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-06-28.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 History and patronage. Fundación Ibercivis. Retrieved 2026-06-28.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 IBERCIVIS, science at home. Observatorio de la Transferencia de Tecnología y Conocimiento. Retrieved 2026-06-28.
  4. ↑ Organisation :: Ibercivis Foundation. European Citizen Science Association. Retrieved 2026-06-28.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Forum::The Projects::Time to Retire Ibercivis BOINC. BOINCstats/BAM!. Retrieved 2026-06-28.
  6. ↑ Forum::New projects::Ibercivis project is back again. BOINCstats/BAM!. Retrieved 2026-06-28.
  7. ↑ Fusion (Ibercivis). L'Alliance Francophone. Retrieved 2026-06-28.
  8. ↑ Publications by BOINC Projects. BOINC. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 2026-06-28.

External links

Retrieved from "https://boincsynergy.ca/wiki/index.php?title=Ibercivis&oldid=1651"