BOINC Projects - Recent changes [en]

Virtual Prairie

Al Piskun — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 15:15:11 GMT

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← Older revision		Revision as of 15:15, 26 July 2026
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	; Using BOINC-computed data		; Using BOINC-computed data
	* Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui, Marie-Lise Benot. "Large scale parameter study of an individual-based model of clonal plant with volunteer computing." ''Ecological Modelling'', vol. 222, no. 4, 2011, pp. 935–946. {{doi\|10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2010.10.014}}<ref name="ecolmodel2011" />		* Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui, Marie-Lise Benot. "Large scale parameter study of an individual-based model of clonal plant with volunteer computing." ''Ecological Modelling'', vol. 222, no. 4, 2011, pp. 935–946. {{doi\|10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2010.10.014}}<ref name="ecolmodel2011" />
	* Malek Smaoui, Marc Garbey. "Parallel Genetic Algorithm Implementation for BOINC." ''Parallel Computing: From Multicores and GPU's to Petascale'', vol. 19, IOS Press, 2010, pp. 212–219 (Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Computing, ParCo, 1–4 September 2009, Lyon, France).<ref name="parco2009" />		* Malek Smaoui, Marc Garbey. "[https://web.archive.org/web/20100724031842/http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/pages_site_aurelie/ParCo09Smaoui_Garbey.pdf Parallel Genetic Algorithm Implementation for BOINC.]" ''Parallel Computing: From Multicores and GPU's to Petascale'', vol. 19, IOS Press, 2010, pp. 212–219 (Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Computing, ParCo, 1–4 September 2009, Lyon, France).<ref name="parco2009" />
	* Malek Smaoui, Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony. "Virtual Prairie: Going green with volunteer computing." ''Proceedings of the IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference'' (APSCC), 9–12 December 2008, Yilan, Taiwan, pp. 427–434.<ref name="apscc2008">{{cite conference \|authors=Malek Smaoui, Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony \|title=Virtual Prairie: Going green with volunteer computing \|booktitle=Proceedings of the IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference \|pages=427–434 \|date=2008 \|conference=APSCC, 9–12 December 2008, Yilan, Taiwan}}</ref>		* Malek Smaoui, Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony. "[https://www.academia.edu/75230011/Virtual_Prairie_Going_Green_with_Volunteer_Computing Virtual Prairie: Going green with volunteer computing.]" ''Proceedings of the IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference'' (APSCC), 9–12 December 2008, Yilan, Taiwan, pp. 427–434.<ref name="apscc2008">{{cite conference \|authors=Malek Smaoui, Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony \|title=Virtual Prairie: Going green with volunteer computing \|booktitle=Proceedings of the IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference \|pages=427–434 \|date=2008 \|conference=APSCC, 9–12 December 2008, Yilan, Taiwan}}</ref>
	* Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony, Malek Smaoui. "Fluid flow, agent based hybrid model for the simulation of virtual prairies." ''Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering'', vol. 74, part 10, 2011, pp. 369–376 (Proceedings of the Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics Conference, ParCFD, 18–22 May 2008, Lyon, France).<ref name="parcfd2008">{{cite conference \|authors=Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony, Malek Smaoui \|title=Fluid flow, agent based hybrid model for the simulation of virtual prairies \|booktitle=Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering \|volume=74 \|pages=369–376 \|date=2011 \|conference=Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics Conference (ParCFD), 18–22 May 2008, Lyon, France}}</ref>		* Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony, Malek Smaoui. "[https://web.archive.org/web/20110830131424/http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/pages_site_aurelie/ParCFD4.pdf Fluid flow, agent based hybrid model for the simulation of virtual prairies.]" ''Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering'', vol. 74, part 10, 2011, pp. 369–376 (Proceedings of the Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics Conference, ParCFD, 18–22 May 2008, Lyon, France).<ref name="parcfd2008">{{cite conference \|authors=Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony, Malek Smaoui \|title=Fluid flow, agent based hybrid model for the simulation of virtual prairies \|booktitle=Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering \|volume=74 \|pages=369–376 \|date=2011 \|conference=Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics Conference (ParCFD), 18–22 May 2008, Lyon, France}}</ref>

	; Other project-related publications		; Other project-related publications
	* Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui, Waree Rinsurongkawong, Cendrine Mony. "The Virtual Prairie Project." Invited plenary lecture, 2nd International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, Grid and Cloud Computing for Engineering, Ajaccio, Corsica, April 2011, Civil-Comp Press.<ref name="civilcomp2011">{{cite conference \|authors=Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui, Waree Rinsurongkawong, Cendrine Mony \|title=The Virtual Prairie Project \|booktitle=2nd International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, Grid and Cloud Computing for Engineering \|publisher=Civil-Comp Press \|date=April 2011 \|conference=Ajaccio, Corsica}}</ref>		* Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui, Waree Rinsurongkawong, Cendrine Mony. "The Virtual Prairie Project." Invited plenary lecture, 2nd International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, Grid and Cloud Computing for Engineering, Ajaccio, Corsica, April 2011, Civil-Comp Press.<ref name="civilcomp2011">{{cite conference \|authors=Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui, Waree Rinsurongkawong, Cendrine Mony \|title=The Virtual Prairie Project \|booktitle=2nd International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, Grid and Cloud Computing for Engineering \|publisher=Civil-Comp Press \|date=April 2011 \|conference=Ajaccio, Corsica}}</ref>
	* Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey. "Updates on the Virtual Prairie Project." 5th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 22–23 October 2009, Barcelona, Spain.<ref name="workshop2009">{{cite conference \|authors=Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey \|title=Updates on the Virtual Prairie Project \|conference=5th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 22–23 October 2009, Barcelona, Spain}}</ref>		* Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey. "[https://web.archive.org/web/20100724032022/http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/pages_site_aurelie/Boinc_workshop_Marc_Garbey_2.pdf Updates on the Virtual Prairie Project.]" 5th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 22–23 October 2009, Barcelona, Spain.<ref name="workshop2009">{{cite conference \|authors=Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey \|title=Updates on the Virtual Prairie Project \|conference=5th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 22–23 October 2009, Barcelona, Spain}}</ref>
	* Marc Garbey. "Virtual Prairies with BOINC." 4th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 11–12 September 2008, INRIA, Grenoble, France.<ref name="workshop2008">{{cite conference \|authors=Marc Garbey \|title=Virtual Prairies with BOINC \|conference=4th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 11–12 September 2008, INRIA, Grenoble, France}}</ref>		* Marc Garbey. "[https://web.archive.org/web/20100724031558/http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/pages_site_aurelie/Grenoble.pdf Virtual Prairies with BOINC.]" 4th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 11–12 September 2008, INRIA, Grenoble, France.<ref name="workshop2008">{{cite conference \|authors=Marc Garbey \|title=Virtual Prairies with BOINC \|conference=4th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 11–12 September 2008, INRIA, Grenoble, France}}</ref>
	* Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui. "Using modelling to understand clonal strategies in optimal growing conditions." 51st Annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science, 7–12 September 2008, South Africa.<ref name="iavs2008">{{cite conference \|authors=Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui \|title=Using modelling to understand clonal strategies in optimal growing conditions \|conference=51st Annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science, 7–12 September 2008, South Africa}}</ref>		* Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui. "Using modelling to understand clonal strategies in optimal growing conditions." 51st Annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science, 7–12 September 2008, South Africa.<ref name="iavs2008">{{cite conference \|authors=Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui \|title=Using modelling to understand clonal strategies in optimal growing conditions \|conference=51st Annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science, 7–12 September 2008, South Africa}}</ref>

Virtual Prairie

Al Piskun — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:55:18 GMT

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{{Infobox software
| name = Virtual Prairie
| logo =
| logo caption =
| screenshot =
| caption =
| description = Virtual Prairie (ViP) was a completed BOINC volunteer computing project run by the University of Houston and the University of Rennes 1 that used individual-based simulations of clonal plant growth to inform the ecological design of sustainable prairie ecosystems.
| status = Completed
| category = Ecology
| compute = CPU
| dependencies = None
| developer = University of Houston Department of Computer Science; University of Rennes 1 (UMR CNRS ECOBIO)
| author = Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony
| sponsor = [[wikipedia:Agence Nationale de la Recherche|Agence Nationale de la Recherche]] (ANR), [[wikipedia:Centre national de la recherche scientifique|CNRS]], Cemagref, [[wikipedia:French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation|INRIA]]
| maintainer =
| released = 2008
| completed = 2011
| discontinued =
| repository =
| programming language =
| operating system =
| size =
| stats as of =
| average performance =
| active users =
| total users =
| active hosts =
| total hosts =
| rac =
| credit per day =
| gpu performance =
| cpu performance =
| website = {{URL|http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/}} (defunct)
| license =
}}

'''Virtual Prairie''' (also referred to as '''ViP''') was a completed [[BOINC]] [[wikipedia:volunteer computing|volunteer computing]] project that studied the ecology of [[wikipedia:prairie|prairie]] and [[wikipedia:grassland|grassland]] ecosystems through large-scale individual-based simulation of [[wikipedia:clonal colony|clonal plant]] growth.<ref name="uh2009">{{cite web |authors=University of Houston |title=Virtual Prairie Project With Garbey as PI Taking Off |url=https://www.uh.edu/nsm/computer-science/news-events/stories/2009/0422_garbey_02.php |website=University of Houston |date=22 April 2009 |access-date=26 July 2026}}</ref> The project was jointly led by Professor Marc Garbey of the [[wikipedia:University of Houston|University of Houston]] Department of Computer Science and Assistant Professor Cendrine Mony of the [[wikipedia:University of Rennes 1|University of Rennes 1]], and combined high-performance computing with BOINC-based volunteer computing to model how agricultural and land-management practices affect plant competition and genetic structure within prairies.<ref name="sicortex2009">{{cite press release |authors=SiCortex, Inc. |title=Leading International Universities Use SiCortex Computers to Protect Prairial Systems |date=17 February 2009 |location=Maynard, Massachusetts}}</ref>

The project's goal was to help design new grassland systems that balance water purification, biodiversity conservation, and carbon storage.<ref name="sicortex2009" /> At the time it was described by its organizers as the world's largest ecological simulation.<ref name="sicortex2009" />

[[File:Restored tallgrass prairie in DuPage County, Illinois.jpg|thumb|right|Prairie grassland ecosystems, like this restored tallgrass prairie in Illinois, provide ecological services such as water purification, biodiversity support, and carbon storage that the Virtual Prairie project sought to help optimize.]]

== Background ==
Environmental policy developments of the 2000s, including the European [[wikipedia:Common Agricultural Policy|Common Agricultural Policy]] reforms of 2005 and France's Grenelle Environment Forum of 2007, focused new attention on the ecological services provided by grassland ecosystems, particularly the availability of unpolluted fresh water and the regulation of carbon emissions.<ref name="uh2009" /> Natural prairies had historically been studied mainly for their agricultural productivity, but researchers increasingly sought to understand and reproduce their broader ecological functions, including nitrate pollution remediation, erosion prevention, and habitat stability for vulnerable species.<ref name="uh2011">{{cite web |authors=University of Houston |title=Protecting Ecosystems, Pollution Remediation Goals of Research at UH |url=https://www.uh.edu/nsm/news-events/stories/2011/0307_ecosystems.php |website=University of Houston |date=7 March 2011 |access-date=26 July 2026}}</ref>

Virtual Prairie approached this problem computationally: since a prairie is a complex system with emergent properties arising from the interaction of many individual plants, the project's researchers built an [[wikipedia:individual-based model|individual-based model]] (IBM), sometimes described as an [[wikipedia:agent-based model|agent-based model]], to simulate the growth of clonal plants at the level of individual ramets (the repeated modular units of a clonal plant network) and to test which combinations of plant traits and management strategies produced the best ecological outcomes.<ref name="ecolmodel2011" />

== Research design and computational methods ==

=== Individual-based clonal plant model ===
The core simulation, referred to in publications as the CLONAL model, represented a clonal plant as a network of interconnected ramets that could share and store resources.<ref name="ecolmodel2011">{{cite journal |authors=Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui, Marie-Lise Benot |title=Large scale parameter study of an individual-based model of clonal plant with volunteer computing |journal=Ecological Modelling |volume=222 |issue=4 |pages=935–946 |date=2011 |doi=10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2010.10.014}}</ref> The model incorporated nine growth rules governing metabolic processes, plant architecture, and resource sharing and storage, controlled by nineteen input parameters.<ref name="researchgate-smaoui">{{cite web |authors=Malek Smaoui |title=Research works (profile excerpt discussing the CLONAL model parameter study) |url=https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Malek-Smaoui-74531876 |website=ResearchGate |access-date=26 July 2026}}</ref>

Rather than testing only a small, expert-selected subset of parameter combinations, as was typical in earlier ecological modelling literature, the project's researchers chose two to four candidate values for each of the nineteen parameters and tested essentially all resulting combinations, an approach only made tractable through volunteer computing:<ref name="researchgate-smaoui" />

<math>N = \prod_{i=1}^{19} k_i \approx 2 \times 10^{7}</math>

where <math>k_i</math> is the number of candidate values tested for parameter <math>i</math>. Sources close to the project reported the resulting simulation count slightly differently depending on the run being described, with the February 2009 project press release citing more than 22 million completed simulations in the first phase of the project<ref name="sicortex2009" /> and the project's 2011 journal paper describing roughly 20 million parameter combinations tested overall.<ref name="researchgate-smaoui" />

=== Two-phase simulation strategy ===
The project ran in two broad phases. In the first phase, researchers modeled individual plant space colonization through clonal reproduction to generate initial hypotheses about competitive strategies between plant types; this phase alone produced more than 22 million simulation runs and found that prairie growth was best explained not by a single dominant strategy but by a small number of distinct viable strategies.<ref name="sicortex2009" /> The second, more ambitious phase aimed to run thousands of combinations of plant types together in a single master simulation across an entire growing season, in order to identify optimal species combinations for long-term prairie sustainability under varying conditions.<ref name="sicortex2009" />

To manage the scale of the second phase, the team developed a parallel multi-objective [[wikipedia:genetic algorithm|genetic algorithm]] (PGA) that could run on top of BOINC to fine-tune the optimization process, described in a 2009 conference paper by PhD student Malek Smaoui and Garbey.<ref name="parco2009">{{cite conference |authors=Malek Smaoui, Marc Garbey |title=Parallel Genetic Algorithm Implementation for BOINC |booktitle=Parallel Computing: From Multicores and GPU's to Petascale |volume=19 |pages=212–219 |publisher=IOS Press |date=2010 |conference=International Conference on Parallel Computing (ParCo), 1–4 September 2009, Lyon, France}}</ref>

=== Computing infrastructure ===
[[File:UH Science and Engineering Research and Classroom Complex.jpg|thumb|right|The University of Houston, whose Department of Computer Science and Research Computing Center hosted Virtual Prairie's local computing infrastructure.]]

Early, computationally intensive runs used local high-performance computing (HPC) hardware at the University of Houston. The department's third such system, provided by [[wikipedia:SiCortex|SiCortex]], was a single-cabinet 2.1 [[wikipedia:FLOPS|TFLOPS]] cluster built around 648 [[wikipedia:64-bit computing|64-bit]] processors, acquired as a joint venture between the university's Department of Computer Science and its Research Computing Center (RCC).<ref name="sicortex2009" /> SiCortex, which marketed itself on the energy efficiency of its systems, ceased operations in May 2009, a few months after this system was highlighted in connection with the project.<ref name="sicortex-shutdown">{{cite web |authors=HPCwire staff |title=SiCortex Meets an Untimely End |url=https://www.hpcwire.com/2009/05/28/sicortex_meets_an_untimely_end/ |website=HPCwire |date=28 May 2009 |access-date=26 July 2026}}</ref>

[[File:Beaulieu 1 Université de Rennes.JPG|thumb|left|The Beaulieu campus of the University of Rennes 1 in France, home to the UMR CNRS ECOBIO laboratory that led the project's ecological modelling work.]]

For the larger, second-phase master simulations, the project moved to BOINC-based volunteer computing, distributing work to home and lab computers around the world.<ref name="parco2009" /> By 2011, the university reported that more than 10,000 volunteers in 90 countries had contributed computing time to the project.<ref name="uh2011" /> The project's BOINC application was hosted at {{URL|http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/}}, run as a Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center (VCSC) project of the University of Houston.<ref name="vcsc-wiki">{{cite web |authors=BOINC project |title=VirtualCampusSupercomputerCenter |url=https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/VirtualCampusSupercomputerCenter |website=BOINC wiki (GitHub) |access-date=26 July 2026}}</ref>

== Project team ==
Virtual Prairie was a joint effort between two university research groups:
* At the University of Houston, principal investigator Marc Garbey, chair of the Department of Computer Science, worked with PhD students Malek Smaoui, who focused on volunteer computing, evolutionary algorithms, and Monte Carlo methods, and Waree Rinsurongkawong, who worked on parallel data mining methods.<ref name="uh2009" /><ref name="sciencedirect-smaoui">{{cite web |authors=ScienceDirect |title=Improving volunteer computing scheduling for evolutionary algorithms (author biography excerpt) |url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167739X12000921 |website=ScienceDirect |access-date=26 July 2026}}</ref> Multicore and software optimization researcher [[wikipedia:Barbara Chapman (computer scientist)|Barbara Chapman]] also contributed to the project's computing infrastructure work.<ref name="sicortex2009" />
* At the University of Rennes 1, Cendrine Mony led a team that included Professor Bernard Clement and PhD candidates Marie-Lise Benot and Anne-Kristel Bittebiere.<ref name="uh2011" /> Benot later became a post-doctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Alpine Ecology in Grenoble, France.<ref name="uh2011" />

== Funding ==
The project was funded by several French national research agencies, including the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR, under grant ANR-08-SYSC-012), the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Cemagref (the Institute for Research in Science and Technology for the Environment, later merged into [[wikipedia:Irstea|Irstea]]), and INRIA (the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control).<ref name="uh2009" /><ref name="uh2011" /><ref name="anr-grant">{{cite web |authors=BOINC message boards |title=Virtual Prairie results published (forum thread quoting ANR-08-SYSC-012 grant acknowledgement) |url=https://boinc.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=6607 |website=BOINC |date=June 2011 |access-date=26 July 2026}}</ref>

== Results and publications impact ==
The project's central ecological finding, drawn from its large-scale parameter study, was that high plant performance in prairie conditions was reached through several distinct combinations of traits, such as high metabolic gain paired with low resource storage, or short branch spacing, rather than through a single optimal strategy.<ref name="researchgate-smaoui" /> Interactive effects between more than half of the tested input parameters were also demonstrated, providing a level of insight into clonal plant growth strategies that the researchers argued would not have been feasible without volunteer computing.<ref name="researchgate-smaoui" />

== Current status ==
Virtual Prairie's BOINC servers stopped issuing new work sometime around mid-2011, shortly after the project's main results were published in ''Ecological Modelling''; a project administrator confirmed on the BOINC message boards in June 2011 that the servers appeared to have gone silent.<ref name="anr-grant" /> The project's original website, vcsc.cs.uh.edu, no longer hosts Virtual Prairie content.<ref name="surly">{{cite web |title=vcsc.cs.uh.edu site scan |url=https://sur.ly/i/vcsc.cs.uh.edu/ |website=Sur.ly |access-date=26 July 2026}}</ref> The BOINC project maintains an entry for Virtual Prairie in its historical list of retired projects.<ref name="boinc-oldprojects">{{cite web |authors=BOINC |title=old_projects.inc |url=https://github.com/BOINC/boinc-site/blob/master/old_projects.inc |website=GitHub |access-date=26 July 2026}}</ref>

== Publications ==
The project produced the following peer-reviewed and conference publications, drawn from the project's archived publications page:<ref name="vip-pubs">{{cite web |title=Virtual Prairie: Publications (archived) |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130528055610/http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/ |website=Wayback Machine |access-date=26 July 2026}}</ref>

; Using BOINC-computed data
* Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui, Marie-Lise Benot. "Large scale parameter study of an individual-based model of clonal plant with volunteer computing." ''Ecological Modelling'', vol. 222, no. 4, 2011, pp. 935–946. {{doi|10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2010.10.014}}<ref name="ecolmodel2011" />
* Malek Smaoui, Marc Garbey. "Parallel Genetic Algorithm Implementation for BOINC." ''Parallel Computing: From Multicores and GPU's to Petascale'', vol. 19, IOS Press, 2010, pp. 212–219 (Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel Computing, ParCo, 1–4 September 2009, Lyon, France).<ref name="parco2009" />
* Malek Smaoui, Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony. "Virtual Prairie: Going green with volunteer computing." ''Proceedings of the IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference'' (APSCC), 9–12 December 2008, Yilan, Taiwan, pp. 427–434.<ref name="apscc2008">{{cite conference |authors=Malek Smaoui, Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony |title=Virtual Prairie: Going green with volunteer computing |booktitle=Proceedings of the IEEE Asia-Pacific Services Computing Conference |pages=427–434 |date=2008 |conference=APSCC, 9–12 December 2008, Yilan, Taiwan}}</ref>
* Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony, Malek Smaoui. "Fluid flow, agent based hybrid model for the simulation of virtual prairies." ''Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering'', vol. 74, part 10, 2011, pp. 369–376 (Proceedings of the Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics Conference, ParCFD, 18–22 May 2008, Lyon, France).<ref name="parcfd2008">{{cite conference |authors=Marc Garbey, Cendrine Mony, Malek Smaoui |title=Fluid flow, agent based hybrid model for the simulation of virtual prairies |booktitle=Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering |volume=74 |pages=369–376 |date=2011 |conference=Parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics Conference (ParCFD), 18–22 May 2008, Lyon, France}}</ref>

; Other project-related publications
* Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui, Waree Rinsurongkawong, Cendrine Mony. "The Virtual Prairie Project." Invited plenary lecture, 2nd International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, Grid and Cloud Computing for Engineering, Ajaccio, Corsica, April 2011, Civil-Comp Press.<ref name="civilcomp2011">{{cite conference |authors=Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui, Waree Rinsurongkawong, Cendrine Mony |title=The Virtual Prairie Project |booktitle=2nd International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, Grid and Cloud Computing for Engineering |publisher=Civil-Comp Press |date=April 2011 |conference=Ajaccio, Corsica}}</ref>
* Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey. "Updates on the Virtual Prairie Project." 5th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 22–23 October 2009, Barcelona, Spain.<ref name="workshop2009">{{cite conference |authors=Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey |title=Updates on the Virtual Prairie Project |conference=5th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 22–23 October 2009, Barcelona, Spain}}</ref>
* Marc Garbey. "Virtual Prairies with BOINC." 4th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 11–12 September 2008, INRIA, Grenoble, France.<ref name="workshop2008">{{cite conference |authors=Marc Garbey |title=Virtual Prairies with BOINC |conference=4th Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop, 11–12 September 2008, INRIA, Grenoble, France}}</ref>
* Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui. "Using modelling to understand clonal strategies in optimal growing conditions." 51st Annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science, 7–12 September 2008, South Africa.<ref name="iavs2008">{{cite conference |authors=Cendrine Mony, Marc Garbey, Malek Smaoui |title=Using modelling to understand clonal strategies in optimal growing conditions |conference=51st Annual Symposium of the International Association for Vegetation Science, 7–12 September 2008, South Africa}}</ref>

Archived copies of several of these papers and a related workshop video are held via the Wayback Machine on the project's former publications page.<ref name="vip-pubs" />

== See also ==
* [[BOINC]]

== External links ==
* {{URL|http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/|Virtual Prairie project website (defunct)}}
* {{URL|https://web.archive.org/web/20130528055610/http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/|Archived Virtual Prairie website}}

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

[[Category:Completed BOINC projects]]
[[Category:Ecology]]
[[Category:Volunteer computing]]

Kryptos@Home

Al Piskun — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:03:14 GMT

← Older revision		Revision as of 12:03, 26 July 2026
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	'''Kryptos@Home''' was a [[BOINC]] [[wikipedia:Volunteer computing\|volunteer computing]] project that applied [[wikipedia:Genetic algorithm\|genetic algorithms]] to the search for [[wikipedia:Hill cipher\|Hill cipher]] keys, in an attempt to decrypt the unsolved fourth passage, known as K4, of the [[wikipedia:Kryptos\|Kryptos]] sculpture at the grounds of the [[wikipedia:Central Intelligence Agency\|Central Intelligence Agency]] (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia.<ref name="kh-launch">{{Cite web \|title=Project launch \|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210517151345/https://www.kryptosathome.com/forum_thread.php?id=1 \|website=Kryptos@Home Wayback Archive \|date=January 8, 2021 \|access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref> It was launched in January 2021, and it operated for approximately eight months before its servers went offline and the project was abandoned by its volunteer developer.<ref name="boincstats-dead">{{Cite web \|title=Kryptos@Home Dead? \|url=https://www.boincstats.com/forum/10/12718,1 \|website=BOINCstats/BAM! Forum \|access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref>		'''[https://web.archive.org/web/20210125080541/https://www.kryptosathome.com/ Kryptos@Home]''' was a [[BOINC]] [[wikipedia:Volunteer computing\|volunteer computing]] project that applied [[wikipedia:Genetic algorithm\|genetic algorithms]] to the search for [[wikipedia:Hill cipher\|Hill cipher]] keys, in an attempt to decrypt the unsolved fourth passage, known as K4, of the [[wikipedia:Kryptos\|Kryptos]] sculpture at the grounds of the [[wikipedia:Central Intelligence Agency\|Central Intelligence Agency]] (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia.<ref name="kh-launch">{{Cite web \|title=Project launch \|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210517151345/https://www.kryptosathome.com/forum_thread.php?id=1 \|website=Kryptos@Home Wayback Archive \|date=January 8, 2021 \|access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref> It was launched in January 2021, and it operated for approximately eight months before its servers went offline and the project was abandoned by its volunteer developer.<ref name="boincstats-dead">{{Cite web \|title=Kryptos@Home Dead? \|url=https://www.boincstats.com/forum/10/12718,1 \|website=BOINCstats/BAM! Forum \|access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref>

	The project never publicly credited a named individual as its developer; community discussion described it as a one-person effort, reportedly run by a university-affiliated volunteer.<ref name="boincstats-dead"/> Kryptos@Home is not to be confused with the unrelated K4 auction and archival discovery that ultimately disclosed the plaintext of the same cipher in 2025, several years after the project's own computations had ceased.<ref name="sciam2025"/>		The project never publicly credited a named individual as its developer; community discussion described it as a one-person effort, reportedly run by a university-affiliated volunteer.<ref name="boincstats-dead"/> Kryptos@Home is not to be confused with the unrelated K4 auction and archival discovery that ultimately disclosed the plaintext of the same cipher in 2025, several years after the project's own computations had ceased.<ref name="sciam2025"/>

	== Background: the Kryptos sculpture ==		== Background: the Kryptos sculpture ==
	[[File:Kryptos sculptor.jpg\|thumb~~\|right~~\|The S-shaped copper screen bearing the Kryptos ciphertexts, in the courtyard of the CIA's George Bush Center for Intelligence]]		[[File:Kryptos sculptor.jpg\|thumb\|The S-shaped copper screen bearing the Kryptos ciphertexts, in the courtyard of the CIA's George Bush Center for Intelligence\|326x326px]]
	Kryptos is a sculpture by American artist [[wikipedia:Jim Sanborn\|Jim Sanborn]], dedicated on November 3, 1990, on the grounds of CIA headquarters at the main entrance to the New Headquarters Building and in the courtyard between that building and the Original Headquarters Building cafeteria.<ref name="kryptos-home">{{Cite web \|title=Kryptos@Home – Project Overview \|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210125080541/https://www.kryptosathome.com/ \|website=Kryptos@Home \|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210125080541/https://www.kryptosathome.com/ \|archive-date=January 25, 2021 \|url-status=dead \|access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref> The centerpiece is a large, vertical S-shaped copper screen bearing four separate encrypted passages, referred to as K1, K2, K3, and K4.<ref name="kryptos-home"/> Sanborn worked for four months with Ed Scheidt, then the retired chairman of the CIA's Office of Communications, to devise the encryption schemes used in the piece.<ref name="kryptos-home"/> The sculpture's name derives from the ancient Greek word for "hidden," and its overall theme is intelligence gathering.<ref name="kryptos-home"/> The design and installation, commissioned through the GSA Art-in-Architecture program, cost $250,000 in 1988 dollars.<ref name="kryptos-home"/>		Kryptos is a sculpture by American artist [[wikipedia:Jim Sanborn\|Jim Sanborn]], dedicated on November 3, 1990, on the grounds of CIA headquarters at the main entrance to the New Headquarters Building and in the courtyard between that building and the Original Headquarters Building cafeteria.<ref name="kryptos-home">{{Cite web \|title=Kryptos@Home – Project Overview \|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210125080541/https://www.kryptosathome.com/ \|website=Kryptos@Home \|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210125080541/https://www.kryptosathome.com/ \|archive-date=January 25, 2021 \|url-status=dead \|access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref> The centerpiece is a large, vertical S-shaped copper screen bearing four separate encrypted passages, referred to as K1, K2, K3, and K4.<ref name="kryptos-home"/> Sanborn worked for four months with Ed Scheidt, then the retired chairman of the CIA's Office of Communications, to devise the encryption schemes used in the piece.<ref name="kryptos-home"/> The sculpture's name derives from the ancient Greek word for "hidden," and its overall theme is intelligence gathering.<ref name="kryptos-home"/> The design and installation, commissioned through the GSA Art-in-Architecture program, cost $250,000 in 1988 dollars.<ref name="kryptos-home"/>

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	== Software and applications ==		== Software and applications ==
	~~[[File:Kryptos01 1, background removed.png\|thumb\|right\|The encrypted copper screen of the Kryptos sculpture, isolated from its background]]~~
	The project distributed its computational application, referred to in configuration files by the internal name <code>kryptos-plato</code>, as an [[wikipedia:VM (BOINC)\|Oracle VM VirtualBox]]-based virtual machine application rather than a native executable, running under the BOINC Virtualbox wrapper.<ref name="tsbt-thread"/> Work was available for 64-bit Windows (AMD64/Intel EM64T), 64-bit Linux (AMD64/Intel EM64T), and 64-bit Intel-based macOS 10.5 or later; no GPU-accelerated application was offered.<ref name="amdusers"/> The project's own documentation indicated that a native (non-virtualized) application was planned for at least the Windows platform, though it is not confirmed whether such a native client was ever released before the project went offline.<ref name="tsbt-thread"/>		The project distributed its computational application, referred to in configuration files by the internal name <code>kryptos-plato</code>, as an [[wikipedia:VM (BOINC)\|Oracle VM VirtualBox]]-based virtual machine application rather than a native executable, running under the BOINC Virtualbox wrapper.<ref name="tsbt-thread"/> Work was available for 64-bit Windows (AMD64/Intel EM64T), 64-bit Linux (AMD64/Intel EM64T), and 64-bit Intel-based macOS 10.5 or later; no GPU-accelerated application was offered.<ref name="amdusers"/> The project's own documentation indicated that a native (non-virtualized) application was planned for at least the Windows platform, though it is not confirmed whether such a native client was ever released before the project went offline.<ref name="tsbt-thread"/>

Kryptos@Home

Al Piskun — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 11:59:30 GMT

first light

New page

{{Infobox software
| name = Kryptos@Home
| logo = Kryptos-logo.jpg
| logo caption = Kryptos@Home logo
| screenshot =
| caption =
| description = Kryptos@Home was a short-lived BOINC volunteer computing project that used genetic algorithms to search Hill cipher key space in an attempt to decrypt K4, the unsolved fourth passage of the Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters.
| status = Discontinued
| category = Cryptography
| compute = CPU
| dependencies = Oracle VM VirtualBox
| developer =
| author =
| sponsor =
| maintainer =
| released = {{Start date and age|2021|01|12}}
| completed = No
| discontinued = c. September 2021
| repository =
| programming language =
| operating system = Windows, Linux, macOS (64-bit only)
| size =
| stats as of = {{Start date and age|2021|05|17}}
| average performance = 648.87 GigaFLOPS
| active users = 123
| total users = 201
| active hosts = 285
| total hosts = 582
| rac =
| credit per day =
| gpu performance =
| cpu performance =
| website = {{URL|https://www.kryptosathome.com/}}
| license =
}}

'''Kryptos@Home''' was a [[BOINC]] [[wikipedia:Volunteer computing|volunteer computing]] project that applied [[wikipedia:Genetic algorithm|genetic algorithms]] to the search for [[wikipedia:Hill cipher|Hill cipher]] keys, in an attempt to decrypt the unsolved fourth passage, known as K4, of the [[wikipedia:Kryptos|Kryptos]] sculpture at the grounds of the [[wikipedia:Central Intelligence Agency|Central Intelligence Agency]] (CIA) headquarters in Langley, Virginia.<ref name="kh-launch">{{Cite web |title=Project launch |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210517151345/https://www.kryptosathome.com/forum_thread.php?id=1 |website=Kryptos@Home Wayback Archive |date=January 8, 2021 |access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref> It was launched in January 2021, and it operated for approximately eight months before its servers went offline and the project was abandoned by its volunteer developer.<ref name="boincstats-dead">{{Cite web |title=Kryptos@Home Dead? |url=https://www.boincstats.com/forum/10/12718,1 |website=BOINCstats/BAM! Forum |access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref>

The project never publicly credited a named individual as its developer; community discussion described it as a one-person effort, reportedly run by a university-affiliated volunteer.<ref name="boincstats-dead"/> Kryptos@Home is not to be confused with the unrelated K4 auction and archival discovery that ultimately disclosed the plaintext of the same cipher in 2025, several years after the project's own computations had ceased.<ref name="sciam2025"/>

== Background: the Kryptos sculpture ==
[[File:Kryptos sculptor.jpg|thumb|right|The S-shaped copper screen bearing the Kryptos ciphertexts, in the courtyard of the CIA's George Bush Center for Intelligence]]
Kryptos is a sculpture by American artist [[wikipedia:Jim Sanborn|Jim Sanborn]], dedicated on November 3, 1990, on the grounds of CIA headquarters at the main entrance to the New Headquarters Building and in the courtyard between that building and the Original Headquarters Building cafeteria.<ref name="kryptos-home">{{Cite web |title=Kryptos@Home – Project Overview |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210125080541/https://www.kryptosathome.com/ |website=Kryptos@Home |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210125080541/https://www.kryptosathome.com/ |archive-date=January 25, 2021 |url-status=dead |access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref> The centerpiece is a large, vertical S-shaped copper screen bearing four separate encrypted passages, referred to as K1, K2, K3, and K4.<ref name="kryptos-home"/> Sanborn worked for four months with Ed Scheidt, then the retired chairman of the CIA's Office of Communications, to devise the encryption schemes used in the piece.<ref name="kryptos-home"/> The sculpture's name derives from the ancient Greek word for "hidden," and its overall theme is intelligence gathering.<ref name="kryptos-home"/> The design and installation, commissioned through the GSA Art-in-Architecture program, cost $250,000 in 1988 dollars.<ref name="kryptos-home"/>

K1, K2, and K3 were solved by cryptanalysts within a few years of the sculpture's dedication, but K4, a 97-character passage beginning with the letters "OBKR," resisted every public cryptanalytic attempt for more than three decades and became one of the best-known unsolved ciphers in the world.<ref name="wp-kryptos">{{Cite web |title=Kryptos |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kryptos |website=Wikipedia |access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref> Sanborn has stated that solving K4 does not require physical access to the sculpture, which is located on CIA property that is off-limits to the public.<ref name="kryptos-home"/> In addition to the main screen, the installation includes a related Morse code message and a compass rose pointing to a lodestone, along with an adjacent reflecting pool; these elements have long been the subject of speculation about hidden clues, though no solution to K1 through K3 was found to depend on them.<ref name="kryptos-home"/>

== History ==
The projects first post announced the launch of Kryptos@Home on January 8, 2021.<ref name="kh-launch"/> At launch, the project was explicitly labeled as being in a beta-testing stage, and the announcement noted that upload errors were occurring during the initial rollout.<ref name="bs-launch">{{Cite web |title=Project launch |url=https://boincsynergy.ca/blog/kryptoshome/ |website=BOINC Synergy |date=January 12, 2021 |access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref> For security reasons, new accounts could only be created through the project website rather than directly through the BOINC client.<ref name="bs-launch"/> The project maintained a Twitter account (@kryptosathome) and, shortly after launch, added a public Trello board so that participants could track reported issues, requested features, and ongoing development work.<ref name="tsbt-trello">{{Cite web |title=Kryptos@home Trello board added |url=https://tsbt.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=29343 |website=The Scottish Boinc Team Forum |access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref>

The project attracted attention from volunteer computing communities within days of launch, including teams such as [[wikipedia:AMD|AMD]] Users and The Scottish Boinc Team, whose members reported early experiences running its work units.<ref name="amdusers">{{Cite web |title=New Project: Kryptos@Home |url=http://www.amdusers.com/forum/showthread.php/11910-New-Project-Kryptos-Home |website=AMDusers Forum |access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref><ref name="tsbt-thread">{{Cite web |title=Kryptos@Home |url=https://tsbt.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28643 |website=The Scottish Boinc Team Forum |access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref> Multiple contemporaneous forum reports flagged frequent [[wikipedia:VirtualBox|VirtualBox]] hypervisor instability under the project's virtual-machine application, with some volunteers finding that rolling back to an older VirtualBox release (5.2.x) reduced work unit failure rates compared to the then-current 6.1.x branch.<ref name="tsbt-thread"/>

== Computational approach ==
Kryptos@Home's stated research goal was to use genetic algorithms to search for [[wikipedia:Hill cipher|Hill cipher]] keys capable of producing a meaningful decryption of K4.<ref name="tsbt-thread"/> The Hill cipher encrypts a block of plaintext letters, represented as a vector <math>P</math>, by multiplying it against a square key matrix <math>K</math> modulo 26:

<math>C \equiv K P \pmod{26}</math>

Decryption requires the modular inverse of the key matrix:

<math>P \equiv K^{-1} C \pmod{26}</math>

which exists only when <math>K</math> is invertible modulo 26, that is, when <math>\gcd(\det K,\ 26) = 1</math>. Kryptos@Home's applications searched the space of invertible candidate matrices for keys that, when applied to K4, matched a set of cryptographic cribs, fragments of suspected plaintext that Sanborn himself had released to the Kryptos-solving community, while also producing plausible decryptions across the rest of the passage.<ref name="tsbt-thread"/> This distinguished the project's approach from simple brute-force keyspace enumeration, since a genetic algorithm's fitness function could be tuned against partial crib matches to guide the search toward more promising candidate keys.<ref name="tsbt-thread"/>

== Software and applications ==
[[File:Kryptos01 1, background removed.png|thumb|right|The encrypted copper screen of the Kryptos sculpture, isolated from its background]]
The project distributed its computational application, referred to in configuration files by the internal name <code>kryptos-plato</code>, as an [[wikipedia:VM (BOINC)|Oracle VM VirtualBox]]-based virtual machine application rather than a native executable, running under the BOINC Virtualbox wrapper.<ref name="tsbt-thread"/> Work was available for 64-bit Windows (AMD64/Intel EM64T), 64-bit Linux (AMD64/Intel EM64T), and 64-bit Intel-based macOS 10.5 or later; no GPU-accelerated application was offered.<ref name="amdusers"/> The project's own documentation indicated that a native (non-virtualized) application was planned for at least the Windows platform, though it is not confirmed whether such a native client was ever released before the project went offline.<ref name="tsbt-thread"/>

Volunteers could tune concurrency through a standard BOINC <code>app_config.xml</code> entry limiting the number of concurrent <code>kryptos-plato</code> tasks per host, a workaround commonly used to manage the resource demands of the VirtualBox-based application.<ref name="tsbt-thread"/>

== Decline and discontinuation ==
Kryptos@Home's public presence began to lapse in mid-2021. By early October 2021, participants on the BOINCstats/BAM! forums noted that the project's last confirmed server contact had been on July 1, 2021, and that its website had subsequently become unreachable, with its TLS certificate misconfigured to present a certificate for an unrelated domain.<ref name="boincstats-dead"/> Community speculation attributed the outage variously to the developer's academic obligations and to the project being a one-person operation without backup maintainers, though no official explanation was ever published.<ref name="boincstats-dead"/> Forum participants ultimately recommended that the project be treated as discontinued and removed from BOINC project-tracking tools after its website remained unreachable for an extended period with no further communication from its developer.<ref name="boincstats-dead"/>

No official statistics archive, final work unit counts, or closure announcement from the Kryptos@Home team is known to survive; the project's disappearance was documented primarily through third-party community forums rather than through any statement from BOINC Synergy or the project's developer.<ref name="boincstats-dead"/>

== K4's eventual disclosure ==
K4 remained unsolved by any public cryptanalytic method, including efforts such as Kryptos@Home's, for the following several years. In 2025, journalists Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne reported that they had located the plaintext of K4 among archival material related to Sanborn held by the [[wikipedia:Smithsonian Institution|Smithsonian Institution]], rather than through cryptanalysis of the ciphertext itself.<ref name="sciam2025">{{Cite web |title=A Solution to the CIA's Kryptos Code Is Found after 35 Years |url=https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-solution-to-the-cias-kryptos-code-is-found-after-35-years/ |website=Scientific American |date=2025 |access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref> Some members of the Kryptos-solving community disputed whether an archival discovery of this kind constituted a genuine "solution" in the cryptanalytic sense, since it did not involve deriving the plaintext from the ciphertext and key alone.<ref name="sciam2025"/> Later in 2025, Sanborn, citing health concerns, put the original K4 solution materials up for public auction through RR Auction, with the intent of naming a new designated keeper of the sculpture's secret.<ref name="aol-auction">{{Cite web |title=Solution goes on auction for CIA HQ's 'Kryptos' sculpture that has stumped code breakers for decades |url=https://www.aol.com/solution-goes-auction-cia-hqs-050030992.html |website=Associated Press via AOL |date=2025 |access-date=July 26, 2026}}</ref> These developments occurred well after Kryptos@Home's own computations had ceased, and there is no indication that the project's search results contributed to, or anticipated, the archival plaintext later reported.

== See also ==
* [[BOINC]]
* [[Enigma@Home]]

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

[[Category:BOINC projects]]
[[Category:Completed BOINC projects]]
[[Category:Cryptography]]

File:Kryptos-logo.jpg

Al Piskun — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 11:10:38 GMT

Al Piskun uploaded File:Kryptos-logo.jpg Kryptos@Home logo

New page

== Summary ==
Kryptos@Home logo

BOINC projects

Al Piskun — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 11:23:03 GMT

add Taiwan Desktop Grid and eOn See more...

← Older revision		Revision as of 11:23, 25 July 2026
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	\|		\|
	\|		\|
	\| ~~A common problem~~ in ~~theoretical~~ chemistry~~, condensed matter physics~~ and materials science ~~is the calculation of the time evolution of an atomic scale system where chemical reactions and/or diffusion occur~~.		\| Simulate long timescale evolution of atomic scale systems in chemistry and materials science. [[EOn\|See more...]]

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	\| ~~Support the drug discovery, earthquake simulation and climate change applications developing in Asia and also~~ to ~~support the applications developed by IDGF~~.		\| Bridging Taiwanese volunteer computers to European e-Science service grid infrastructure. [[Taiwan Desktop Grid\|See more...]]

	\|-		\|-

Main Page

Al Piskun — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 10:48:12 GMT

← Older revision		Revision as of 10:48, 25 July 2026
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	</div>		</div>
	<div class="bs-stat bs-stat-purple">		<div class="bs-stat bs-stat-purple">
	<div class="bs-stat-number">87</div>		<div class="bs-stat-number">89</div>
	<div class="bs-stat-label">Projects documented</div>		<div class="bs-stat-label">Projects documented</div>
	</div>		</div>
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	\|* [[Docking@Home]] CHARMM-based protein-ligand docking simulations to search for new pharmaceutical drugs		\|* [[Docking@Home]] CHARMM-based protein-ligand docking simulations to search for new pharmaceutical drugs
			\|
			\|-
			\|* [[eOn]] simulate long timescale evolution of atomic scale systems in chemistry and materials science
	\|* [[Enigma@Home]] break unsolved German Kriegsmarine Enigma M4 radio messages from the Second World War		\|* [[Enigma@Home]] break unsolved German Kriegsmarine Enigma M4 radio messages from the Second World War
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	\|* [[SPT]] Symmetric Prime Tuples		\|* [[SPT]] Symmetric Prime Tuples
	\|		\|* [[Taiwan Desktop Grid]] bridging Taiwanese volunteer computers to European e-Science service grid infrastructure
	\|-		\|-
	\|* [[TANPAKU]] used a Brownian dynamics method to study protein folding		\|* [[TANPAKU]] used a Brownian dynamics method to study protein folding

EOn

Al Piskun — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 10:22:59 GMT

← Older revision		Revision as of 10:22, 25 July 2026
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	\| gpu performance =		\| gpu performance =
	\| cpu performance =		\| cpu performance =
	\| website = {{URL\|~~https://web.archive.org/~~http://eon.ices.utexas.edu/eon2/}}		\| website = {{URL\|http://eon.ices.utexas.edu/eon2/}}
	\| license = GPL-3.0		\| license = GPL-3.0
	}}		}}
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	{{Lowercase title}}		{{Lowercase title}}

	'''eOn''' (styled '''eOn2''' during its time on the [[wikipedia:Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing\|BOINC]] platform) was a completed [[wikipedia:volunteer computing\|volunteer computing]] project of the Henkelman Research Group at the [[wikipedia:University of Texas at Austin\|University of Texas at Austin]], run out of the university's [[wikipedia:Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences\|Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences]] (ICES).<ref name="wiki-eon">Chill, Samuel T., Matthew Welborn, Rye Terrell, Liang Zhang, Jean-Claude Berthet, Andreas Pedersen, Hannes Jónsson, Graeme Henkelman. [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002 EON: software for long time simulations of atomic scale systems]. ''Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering'' 22(5), 055002 (2014). {{DOI\|10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002}}.</ref> The project applied [[wikipedia:theoretical chemistry\|theoretical chemistry]] methods, chiefly [[wikipedia:transition state theory\|transition state theory]] combined with [[wikipedia:kinetic Monte Carlo\|kinetic Monte Carlo]], to model the evolution of atomic scale systems over timescales far longer than those reachable with conventional [[wikipedia:molecular dynamics\|molecular dynamics]]. Its name is drawn from ''[[wikipedia:aeon\|eon]]'', a reference to the immeasurably long timescales the software was built to reach.<ref name="bcteam">[https://www.bc-team.org/viewtopic.php?t=595 eOn]. BOINC Confederation forum. Posted 1 September 2010.</ref>		'''[https://web.archive.org/http://eon.ices.utexas.edu/eon2/ eOn]''' (styled '''eOn2''' during its time on the [[wikipedia:Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing\|BOINC]] platform) was a completed [[wikipedia:volunteer computing\|volunteer computing]] project of the Henkelman Research Group at the [[wikipedia:University of Texas at Austin\|University of Texas at Austin]], run out of the university's [[wikipedia:Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences\|Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences]] (ICES).<ref name="wiki-eon">Chill, Samuel T., Matthew Welborn, Rye Terrell, Liang Zhang, Jean-Claude Berthet, Andreas Pedersen, Hannes Jónsson, Graeme Henkelman. [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002 EON: software for long time simulations of atomic scale systems]. ''Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering'' 22(5), 055002 (2014). {{DOI\|10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002}}.</ref> The project applied [[wikipedia:theoretical chemistry\|theoretical chemistry]] methods, chiefly [[wikipedia:transition state theory\|transition state theory]] combined with [[wikipedia:kinetic Monte Carlo\|kinetic Monte Carlo]], to model the evolution of atomic scale systems over timescales far longer than those reachable with conventional [[wikipedia:molecular dynamics\|molecular dynamics]]. Its name is drawn from ''[[wikipedia:aeon\|eon]]'', a reference to the immeasurably long timescales the software was built to reach.<ref name="bcteam">[https://www.bc-team.org/viewtopic.php?t=595 eOn]. BOINC Confederation forum. Posted 1 September 2010.</ref>

	eOn joined the BOINC network in September 2010 and ran until it was retired in May 2014. The underlying EON research code, distinct from the retired volunteer computing project, continues to be developed and used within the [[wikipedia:computational chemistry\|computational chemistry]] community.		eOn joined the BOINC network in September 2010 and ran until it was retired in May 2014. The underlying EON research code, distinct from the retired volunteer computing project, continues to be developed and used within the [[wikipedia:computational chemistry\|computational chemistry]] community.
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	Early participants reported a bumpy rollout, including client crashes on Mac OS X and complaints about long-running, unchecked work units, alongside genuine enthusiasm from teams that had followed the Henkelman group's earlier, non-BOINC eOn effort.<ref name="boinc-launch" /><ref name="eonclient400">eOn Client 4.00. UT theoretical chemistry code forum. Posted February 2012.</ref>		Early participants reported a bumpy rollout, including client crashes on Mac OS X and complaints about long-running, unchecked work units, alongside genuine enthusiasm from teams that had followed the Henkelman group's earlier, non-BOINC eOn effort.<ref name="boinc-launch" /><ref name="eonclient400">eOn Client 4.00. UT theoretical chemistry code forum. Posted February 2012.</ref>

	[[File:UT Tower, University of Texas in Austin.jpg\|thumb\|The University of Texas at Austin, home to the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, where eOn was developed and hosted.]]		[[File:UT Tower, University of Texas in Austin.jpg\|thumb\|The University of Texas at Austin, home to the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, where eOn was developed and hosted.\|658x658px]]

	== Scientific method ==		== Scientific method ==
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	The dimer is rotated to align with this minimum mode and then walked uphill along it until it converges on a saddle point.<ref name="dimer1999" /> Besides aKMC, the EON software also implemented [[wikipedia:parallel replica dynamics\|parallel replica dynamics]], [[wikipedia:hyperdynamics\|hyperdynamics]], and global optimization methods including [[wikipedia:simulated annealing\|simulated annealing]], [[wikipedia:basin hopping\|basin hopping]], and minima hopping.<ref name="wiki-eon" />		The dimer is rotated to align with this minimum mode and then walked uphill along it until it converges on a saddle point.<ref name="dimer1999" /> Besides aKMC, the EON software also implemented [[wikipedia:parallel replica dynamics\|parallel replica dynamics]], [[wikipedia:hyperdynamics\|hyperdynamics]], and global optimization methods including [[wikipedia:simulated annealing\|simulated annealing]], [[wikipedia:basin hopping\|basin hopping]], and minima hopping.<ref name="wiki-eon" />

	[[File:Potential Energy Surface and Corresponding Reaction Coordinate Diagram.png\|thumb\|A potential energy surface with a saddle point separating two minima, the kind of feature EON's dimer method searches for.]]

	== Software architecture ==		== Software architecture ==
	EON used a client/server design: computationally intensive force and energy evaluations ran on volunteer client machines, while a central server managed the overall state-to-state evolution of the simulation, for example driving the kinetic Monte Carlo bookkeeping in aKMC runs. The server was written in [[wikipedia:Python (programming language)\|Python]] and the client in [[wikipedia:C++\|C++]], the latter chosen so that a self-contained compiled executable could be distributed easily to volunteers.<ref name="wiki-eon" /> Beyond BOINC, the same codebase could also run on a single workstation, on cluster queuing systems, and on large parallel machines via [[wikipedia:Message Passing Interface\|MPI]].<ref name="ltd-docs" /> The code was released under version 3 of the [[wikipedia:GNU General Public License\|GNU General Public License]].<ref name="wiki-eon" />		[[File:Potential Energy Surface and Corresponding Reaction Coordinate Diagram.png\|thumb\|A potential energy surface with a saddle point separating two minima, the kind of feature EON's dimer method searches for.\|left\|344x344px]]EON used a client/server design: computationally intensive force and energy evaluations ran on volunteer client machines, while a central server managed the overall state-to-state evolution of the simulation, for example driving the kinetic Monte Carlo bookkeeping in aKMC runs. The server was written in [[wikipedia:Python (programming language)\|Python]] and the client in [[wikipedia:C++\|C++]], the latter chosen so that a self-contained compiled executable could be distributed easily to volunteers.<ref name="wiki-eon" /> Beyond BOINC, the same codebase could also run on a single workstation, on cluster queuing systems, and on large parallel machines via [[wikipedia:Message Passing Interface\|MPI]].<ref name="ltd-docs" /> The code was released under version 3 of the [[wikipedia:GNU General Public License\|GNU General Public License]].<ref name="wiki-eon" />

	== Discontinuation ==		== Discontinuation ==
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	== Publications ==		== Publications ==
	The Berkeley BOINC project maintains a list of [https://boinc.berkeley.edu/pubs.php#EOn publications with results arising from BOINC-based computing], including work that made use of the eOn volunteer computing project:<ref name="pubs-boinc">Publications by BOINC Projects. boinc.berkeley.edu/pubs.php. Maintained by Alex Piskun.</ref>		[[File:TiltAndTwistBoundaries remade.JPG\|thumb\|Illustration of tilt and twist grain boundaries, the kind of defect studied in the 2009 EON simulation of a copper grain boundary.\|439x439px]]The Berkeley BOINC project maintains a list of [https://boinc.berkeley.edu/pubs.php#EOn publications with results arising from BOINC-based computing], including work that made use of the eOn volunteer computing project:<ref name="pubs-boinc">Publications by BOINC Projects. boinc.berkeley.edu/pubs.php. Maintained by Alex Piskun.</ref>

	# Chill, Samuel T., Matthew Welborn, Rye Terrell, Liang Zhang, Jean-Claude Berthet, Andreas Pedersen, Hannes Jónsson, Graeme Henkelman. [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002 EON: software for long time simulations of atomic scale systems]. ''Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering'' 22(5), 055002 (2014). {{DOI\|10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002}}.		# Chill, Samuel T., Matthew Welborn, Rye Terrell, Liang Zhang, Jean-Claude Berthet, Andreas Pedersen, Hannes Jónsson, Graeme Henkelman. [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002 EON: software for long time simulations of atomic scale systems]. ''Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering'' 22(5), 055002 (2014). {{DOI\|10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002}}.
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	# Xu, Lijun, Graeme Henkelman. [http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2976010 Adaptive kinetic Monte Carlo for first-principles accelerated dynamics]. ''The Journal of Chemical Physics'' (2008). {{DOI\|10.1063/1.2976010}}.		# Xu, Lijun, Graeme Henkelman. [http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2976010 Adaptive kinetic Monte Carlo for first-principles accelerated dynamics]. ''The Journal of Chemical Physics'' (2008). {{DOI\|10.1063/1.2976010}}.
	# Henkelman, Graeme, Hannes Jónsson. [https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.116101 Multiple Time Scale Simulations of Metal Crystal Growth Reveal the Importance of Multiatom Surface Processes]. ''Physical Review Letters'' (2003). {{DOI\|10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.116101}}.		# Henkelman, Graeme, Hannes Jónsson. [https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.116101 Multiple Time Scale Simulations of Metal Crystal Growth Reveal the Importance of Multiatom Surface Processes]. ''Physical Review Letters'' (2003). {{DOI\|10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.116101}}.

	~~[[File:TiltAndTwistBoundaries remade.JPG\|thumb\|Illustration of tilt and twist grain boundaries, the kind of defect studied in the 2009 EON simulation of a copper grain boundary.]]~~

	No additional eOn-specific publications beyond these six were found in the BOINC publications registry at the time of writing.		No additional eOn-specific publications beyond these six were found in the BOINC publications registry at the time of writing.

EOn

Al Piskun — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 10:17:01 GMT

first light

New page

{{Infobox software
| name = eOn
| logo =
| logo caption =
| screenshot =
| caption =
| description = eOn (also known as eOn2 on BOINC) was a completed volunteer computing project run by the Henkelman Research Group at the University of Texas at Austin. It used adaptive kinetic Monte Carlo and dimer method saddle point searches to simulate the long timescale evolution of atomic scale systems in chemistry and materials science.
| status = Completed
| category = Materials Science
| compute = CPU
| dependencies = None
| developer = Henkelman Research Group, University of Texas at Austin, in collaboration with the Jónsson Research Group, University of Iceland
| author = Graeme Henkelman and Hannes Jónsson
| sponsor = Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences (ICES), University of Texas at Austin
| maintainer = Discontinued as a BOINC project; the underlying EON software is maintained independently (see [[#Legacy|Legacy]])
| released = {{Start date and age|2010|09|07}}
| completed = Yes
| discontinued = {{Start date and age|2014|05|26}}
| repository = {{URL|https://github.com/TheochemUI/eOn}}
| programming language = C++ (client), Python (server)
| operating system = Windows, Linux, macOS
| size = Not documented
| stats as of =
| average performance =
| active users =
| total users =
| active hosts =
| total hosts =
| rac =
| credit per day =
| gpu performance =
| cpu performance =
| website = {{URL|https://web.archive.org/http://eon.ices.utexas.edu/eon2/}}
| license = GPL-3.0
}}

{{Lowercase title}}

'''eOn''' (styled '''eOn2''' during its time on the [[wikipedia:Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing|BOINC]] platform) was a completed [[wikipedia:volunteer computing|volunteer computing]] project of the Henkelman Research Group at the [[wikipedia:University of Texas at Austin|University of Texas at Austin]], run out of the university's [[wikipedia:Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences|Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences]] (ICES).<ref name="wiki-eon">Chill, Samuel T., Matthew Welborn, Rye Terrell, Liang Zhang, Jean-Claude Berthet, Andreas Pedersen, Hannes Jónsson, Graeme Henkelman. [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002 EON: software for long time simulations of atomic scale systems]. ''Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering'' 22(5), 055002 (2014). {{DOI|10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002}}.</ref> The project applied [[wikipedia:theoretical chemistry|theoretical chemistry]] methods, chiefly [[wikipedia:transition state theory|transition state theory]] combined with [[wikipedia:kinetic Monte Carlo|kinetic Monte Carlo]], to model the evolution of atomic scale systems over timescales far longer than those reachable with conventional [[wikipedia:molecular dynamics|molecular dynamics]]. Its name is drawn from ''[[wikipedia:aeon|eon]]'', a reference to the immeasurably long timescales the software was built to reach.<ref name="bcteam">[https://www.bc-team.org/viewtopic.php?t=595 eOn]. BOINC Confederation forum. Posted 1 September 2010.</ref>

eOn joined the BOINC network in September 2010 and ran until it was retired in May 2014. The underlying EON research code, distinct from the retired volunteer computing project, continues to be developed and used within the [[wikipedia:computational chemistry|computational chemistry]] community.

== History ==

=== Origins ===
The EON software grew out of long-running work in the Henkelman group (University of Texas at Austin) and the Jónsson group (then at the University of Iceland) on methods for simulating rare-event dynamics in solids, building on the [[wikipedia:dimer method|dimer method]] the two researchers had developed for locating [[wikipedia:saddle point|saddle points]] on potential energy surfaces without needing a known final state.<ref name="dimer1999">Henkelman, Graeme, Hannes Jónsson. [https://henkelmanlab.org/pubs/henkelman99_7010.pdf A dimer method for finding saddle points on high dimensional potential surfaces using only first derivatives]. ''The Journal of Chemical Physics'' 111(15), 7010 (1999). {{DOI|10.1063/1.480097}}.</ref> Before it was ported to BOINC, the group ran an earlier, home-built distributed computing system under the name eOn; forum members reported that the "old eOn client application" was subsequently rebuilt on BOINC's client/server architecture as eOn2, with the intention of later adding dynamics trajectories and ''[[wikipedia:ab initio quantum chemistry methods|ab initio]]'' ([[wikipedia:density functional theory|density functional theory]]) work units.<ref name="welcome-eon2">Welcome to the world, eOn2. UT theoretical chemistry code forum. Posted September 2010.</ref> For a time two separate project addresses existed, one on the group's older ''cm.utexas.edu'' domain and one on ''ices.utexas.edu''; volunteers were directed to the ICES address as the project's active server.<ref name="two-eon-sites">Two eon web sites. UT theoretical chemistry code forum. Posted 22 November 2011.</ref>

=== Launch on BOINC ===
eOn was announced as a new BOINC project on 7 September 2010 by [[wikipedia:David P. Anderson|David P. Anderson]], describing it as a study of "the dynamic simulation of physical and chemical processes over a time scale which is much longer than can be reached with traditional molecular dynamics."<ref name="boinc-launch">Anderson, David P. New project: eOn. BOINC News forum, message 34564. Posted 7 September 2010.</ref> Because the generation of new work units depended on the results already returned by earlier ones, eOn could typically only keep a handful of tasks in flight on any one host at a time, a workflow characteristic of its [[#Scientific method|adaptive kinetic Monte Carlo]] approach.<ref name="wiki-eon" />

Early participants reported a bumpy rollout, including client crashes on Mac OS X and complaints about long-running, unchecked work units, alongside genuine enthusiasm from teams that had followed the Henkelman group's earlier, non-BOINC eOn effort.<ref name="boinc-launch" /><ref name="eonclient400">eOn Client 4.00. UT theoretical chemistry code forum. Posted February 2012.</ref>

[[File:UT Tower, University of Texas in Austin.jpg|thumb|The University of Texas at Austin, home to the Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences, where eOn was developed and hosted.]]

== Scientific method ==
eOn's simulations targeted ''rare event'' systems, ones in which the interesting physics, such as [[wikipedia:diffusion|diffusion]] in solids or [[wikipedia:chemical reaction|chemical reactions]] at surfaces, consists of infrequent transitions between long-lived stable states, separated by fast atomic vibrations that are many orders of magnitude quicker than the transitions themselves. A direct [[wikipedia:molecular dynamics|molecular dynamics]] simulation tracking every vibration would need to run for a computationally unreasonable length of time before a single event of interest occurred.<ref name="ltd-docs">EON: Long Timescale Dynamics. Henkelman Research Group documentation. henkelmanlab.org/research/ltd/.</ref>

To get around this, EON combines transition state theory with kinetic Monte Carlo in an approach called adaptive kinetic Monte Carlo (aKMC). Rather than drawing transition rates from a predefined table of possible events, aKMC discovers the available transitions on the fly by searching for first-order saddle points around the current state.<ref name="akmc-docs">Adaptive kinetic Monte Carlo. EON documentation. henkelmanlab.org/eon/akmc.html.</ref> Under the harmonic approximation to transition state theory, the rate of an individual transition takes the Arrhenius-like form

<math>k = \nu \, e^{-\Delta E_a / k_B T}</math>

where <math>\Delta E_a</math> is the energy barrier between the initial minimum and the saddle point, <math>T</math> is the temperature, <math>k_B</math> is the [[wikipedia:Boltzmann constant|Boltzmann constant]], and the prefactor <math>\nu</math> is calculated from the [[wikipedia:normal mode|vibrational modes]] at the minimum and the saddle point.<ref name="akmc-docs" />

Saddle points themselves were located with the dimer method, in which two closely spaced replicas of the system ("the dimer") are used to estimate the direction of lowest curvature on the potential energy surface using only first derivatives of the energy, avoiding the cost of computing a full [[wikipedia:Hessian matrix|Hessian]]:

<math>\mathbf{R}_{1,2} = \mathbf{R}_0 \pm \Delta R\,\hat{N}</math>

The dimer is rotated to align with this minimum mode and then walked uphill along it until it converges on a saddle point.<ref name="dimer1999" /> Besides aKMC, the EON software also implemented [[wikipedia:parallel replica dynamics|parallel replica dynamics]], [[wikipedia:hyperdynamics|hyperdynamics]], and global optimization methods including [[wikipedia:simulated annealing|simulated annealing]], [[wikipedia:basin hopping|basin hopping]], and minima hopping.<ref name="wiki-eon" />

[[File:Potential Energy Surface and Corresponding Reaction Coordinate Diagram.png|thumb|A potential energy surface with a saddle point separating two minima, the kind of feature EON's dimer method searches for.]]

== Software architecture ==
EON used a client/server design: computationally intensive force and energy evaluations ran on volunteer client machines, while a central server managed the overall state-to-state evolution of the simulation, for example driving the kinetic Monte Carlo bookkeeping in aKMC runs. The server was written in [[wikipedia:Python (programming language)|Python]] and the client in [[wikipedia:C++|C++]], the latter chosen so that a self-contained compiled executable could be distributed easily to volunteers.<ref name="wiki-eon" /> Beyond BOINC, the same codebase could also run on a single workstation, on cluster queuing systems, and on large parallel machines via [[wikipedia:Message Passing Interface|MPI]].<ref name="ltd-docs" /> The code was released under version 3 of the [[wikipedia:GNU General Public License|GNU General Public License]].<ref name="wiki-eon" />

== Discontinuation ==
On 26 May 2014, the eOn team posted to the BOINC forums that the project was being retired from the BOINC network.<ref name="discontinuation">Announcement that the eOn project has been discontinued. BOINC Forums, thread 9281. {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140714231802/http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=9281|date=14 July 2014}}.</ref> Volunteer forums reported that the eOn server was taken offline shortly afterward, with one community post noting that it had been "retired" with little fanfare and that "the server has been switched off already."<ref name="tsbt-retired">eOn retired. The Scottish BOINC Team forum. May 2014.</ref> A follow-up post from the project team described the decision as a practical one: the project had been useful but had become increasingly cumbersome to maintain relative to the group's other computational resources.<ref name="tsbt-retired" />

== Legacy ==
The retirement of the BOINC-facing eOn2 project did not end development of the underlying EON software. Around 2018, the codebase was relicensed from GPL-3.0 to the [[wikipedia:BSD licenses|BSD 3-Clause license]] so that it could be incorporated into the Amsterdam Modeling Suite, a commercial computational chemistry platform.<ref name="goswami-blog">Goswami, Rohit. [https://rgoswami.me/posts/eon-acad-foss/ Reconciling eOn for Academia and Open Source]. Personal blog. Retrieved 2026.</ref> From 2019 onward, the code was migrated from its original Subversion repository to GitHub, and it continues to be maintained as an open-source research code, including a Gaussian process-accelerated dimer method contributed as part of doctoral work associated with the University of Iceland.<ref name="goswami-blog" /> This ongoing development is separate from the discontinued volunteer computing project and does not distribute work to BOINC volunteers.

== Publications ==
The Berkeley BOINC project maintains a list of [https://boinc.berkeley.edu/pubs.php#EOn publications with results arising from BOINC-based computing], including work that made use of the eOn volunteer computing project:<ref name="pubs-boinc">Publications by BOINC Projects. boinc.berkeley.edu/pubs.php. Maintained by Alex Piskun.</ref>

# Chill, Samuel T., Matthew Welborn, Rye Terrell, Liang Zhang, Jean-Claude Berthet, Andreas Pedersen, Hannes Jónsson, Graeme Henkelman. [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002 EON: software for long time simulations of atomic scale systems]. ''Modelling and Simulation in Materials Science and Engineering'' 22(5), 055002 (2014). {{DOI|10.1088/0965-0393/22/5/055002}}.
# Pedersen, Andreas, Graeme Henkelman, Jakob Schiøtz, Hannes Jónsson. [https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/11/7/073034 Long time scale simulation of a grain boundary in copper]. ''New Journal of Physics'' 11(7), 073034 (2009). {{DOI|10.1088/1367-2630/11/7/073034}}.
# Mei, Donghai, Lijun Xu, Graeme Henkelman. [https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jp808211q Potential Energy Surface of Methanol Decomposition on Cu(110)]. ''The Journal of Physical Chemistry C'' (2009). {{DOI|10.1021/jp808211q}}.
# Xu, Lijun, Donghai Mei, Graeme Henkelman. [http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.3281688 Adaptive kinetic Monte Carlo simulation of methanol decomposition on Cu(100)]. ''The Journal of Chemical Physics'' (2009). {{DOI|10.1063/1.3281688}}.
# Xu, Lijun, Graeme Henkelman. [http://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2976010 Adaptive kinetic Monte Carlo for first-principles accelerated dynamics]. ''The Journal of Chemical Physics'' (2008). {{DOI|10.1063/1.2976010}}.
# Henkelman, Graeme, Hannes Jónsson. [https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.116101 Multiple Time Scale Simulations of Metal Crystal Growth Reveal the Importance of Multiatom Surface Processes]. ''Physical Review Letters'' (2003). {{DOI|10.1103/PhysRevLett.90.116101}}.

[[File:TiltAndTwistBoundaries remade.JPG|thumb|Illustration of tilt and twist grain boundaries, the kind of defect studied in the 2009 EON simulation of a copper grain boundary.]]

No additional eOn-specific publications beyond these six were found in the BOINC publications registry at the time of writing.

== See also ==
* [[BOINC projects]]
* [[Einstein@Home]]
* [[The Lattice Project]]

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

== External links ==
* {{URL|https://web.archive.org/http://eon.ices.utexas.edu/eon2/|Archived eOn2 project homepage}}
* {{URL|https://github.com/TheochemUI/eOn|EON software repository (post-BOINC continuation)}}
* {{URL|https://henkelmanlab.org/research/ltd/|Henkelman Research Group: Long Timescale Dynamics}}

[[Category:Completed BOINC projects]]
[[Category:Chemistry]]
[[Category:Materials science]]
[[Category:University of Texas at Austin]]

Taiwan Desktop Grid

Al Piskun — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 09:40:13 GMT

first light

New page

{{Infobox software
| name = Taiwan Desktop Grid
| logo =
| logo caption =
| screenshot =
| caption =
| description = Taiwan Desktop Grid was a completed BOINC-based desktop grid project operated by the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre, bridging Taiwanese volunteer computers to European e-Science service grid infrastructure.
| status = Completed
| category = Multiple applications
| compute = CPU
| dependencies =
| developer = Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC)
| author =
| sponsor = [[wikipedia:Academia Sinica|Academia Sinica]]
| maintainer =
| released = {{Start date and age|2010|10|28}}<ref name="launch-note">The exact launch date of Taiwan Desktop Grid is not documented. This date reflects the earliest application installation timestamp recorded on the project's archived application list, the 3D Rendering Application, installed 28 October 2010, used here as the best available proxy for the project becoming operational. {{Cite web |url=http://vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg/apps.php |title=Applications | Taiwan Desktop Grid |publisher=Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120730171203/http://vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg/apps.php |archive-date=30 July 2012 |url-status=dead |access-date=25 July 2026}}</ref>
| completed = No
| discontinued = Between April 2014 and February 2015<ref name="shutdown-note">The project's homepage was still loading normally in a Wayback Machine snapshot dated 23 April 2014, the last confirmed working capture. A later snapshot from around 23 February 2015 shows only a database connection error, indicating the underlying BOINC server had gone offline sometime in the intervening months. {{Cite web |url=https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg/ |title=Wayback Machine capture history for vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg |publisher=Internet Archive |access-date=25 July 2026}}</ref>
| repository =
| programming language =
| operating system = Windows, Linux, macOS
| size =
| stats as of =
| average performance =
| active users =
| total users =
| active hosts =
| total hosts =
| rac =
| credit per day =
| gpu performance =
| cpu performance =
| website = {{URL|http://vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg/}} (no longer active)
| license =
}}

'''[https://web.archive.org/web/20120825055512/http://vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg/ Taiwan Desktop Grid]''' was a [[wikipedia:BOINC|BOINC]]-based [[wikipedia:desktop grid computing|desktop grid]] and volunteer computing project operated by the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC) in [[wikipedia:Taipei|Taipei]], Taiwan. Rather than developing a single dedicated scientific application of its own, the project functioned as a Taiwanese bridging node in a wider international infrastructure, connecting volunteered Asian and European desktop computers to applications supporting drug discovery, earthquake simulation and climate change research, among others, that had been ported to run across linked desktop and service grids.<ref name="asgcdg-about">{{Cite web |url=http://vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg/ |title=Taiwan Desktop Grid |publisher=Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120825055512/http://vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg/ |archive-date=25 August 2012 |url-status=dead |access-date=25 July 2026}}</ref> Volunteers attached to the project by pointing the BOINC client at the address <code>http://vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg/</code>.<ref name="asgcdg-about" /> The project appears to have gone offline sometime between April 2014 and February 2015 and has not since been restored.<ref name="shutdown-note" />

== History ==

=== Background: the Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre ===
[[File:Academia Sinica.JPG|thumb|The main gate of [[wikipedia:Academia Sinica|Academia Sinica]] in Taipei. Its Grid Computing Centre (ASGC) operated Taiwan Desktop Grid.]]
[[wikipedia:Academia Sinica|Academia Sinica]], Taiwan's national academy, joined the [[wikipedia:Worldwide LHC Computing Grid|Worldwide LHC Computing Grid]] (WLCG) project in 2002. The Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre (ASGC) was subsequently established to provide grid computing services to scientists from various domains across Asia-Pacific countries.<ref name="asgcdg-about" /> Since 2005, ASGC has operated the only WLCG Tier-1 centre in Asia and has served as the [[wikipedia:Enabling Grids for E-sciencE|Enabling Grids for E-sciencE]] (EGEE) Federation Coordinator, providing service, coordination and support to e-Science applications worldwide.<ref name="asgcdg-about" />

=== Founding and DEGISCO ===
ASGC became a member of the International Desktop Grid Federation (IDGF), an organisation bringing together companies, universities and institutes involved in desktop grid computing, and represented Taiwan in the [[wikipedia:European Union|European Union]]-funded Desktop Grids for International Scientific Collaboration (DEGISCO) project.<ref name="asgcdg-about" /><ref name="idgf-members">{{Cite web |url=http://desktopgridfederation.org/members |title=Members |publisher=International Desktop Grid Federation |access-date=25 July 2026}}</ref> DEGISCO, funded under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (grant agreement 261561) and coordinated by the Hungarian research institute MTA SZTAKI, ran from 1 June 2010 to 31 May 2012.<ref name="degisco-cordis">{{Cite web |url=https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/261561/results |title=Desktop Grids for International Scientific Collaboration (DEGISCO) |publisher=European Commission, CORDIS |access-date=25 July 2026}}</ref> Building on the earlier EDGeS project, DEGISCO used what was known as 3G Bridge technology to extend the existing European desktop-grid-to-service-grid infrastructure to International Cooperation Partner Countries, of which Taiwan was one, connecting local desktop grids to European service grids such as EGEE.<ref name="degisco-cordis" /> Taiwan Desktop Grid, run on BOINC server software from the address <code>http://vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg/</code>, was ASGC's contribution to this effort.<ref name="asgcdg-about" />

The earliest applications recorded on the project's archived application list, a 3D rendering application and a laser simulation application, were installed on the server on 28 and 29 October 2010 respectively, marking the earliest confirmed activity on the project.<ref name="asgcdg-apps">{{Cite web |url=http://vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg/apps.php |title=Applications | Taiwan Desktop Grid |publisher=Academia Sinica Grid Computing Centre |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120730171203/http://vbridge.twgrid.org/asgcdg/apps.php |archive-date=30 July 2012 |url-status=dead |access-date=25 July 2026}}</ref> Over the following two years, the project accumulated more than a dozen further applications bridged in from the shared EDGeS/DEGISCO application repository, spanning fields including molecular docking, particle physics simulation, materials science and cosmic ray simulation.<ref name="asgcdg-apps" /> The project's own homepage carried news items relating to DEGISCO project meetings, including the ISGC 2012 DEGISCO Workshop, held 27 February to 2 March 2012, and the DEGISCO project's fifth consortium meeting, held 28 to 30 May 2012 in Zaragoza, Spain.<ref name="asgcdg-about" />

=== Discontinuation ===
The project's homepage was still functioning normally in an archived snapshot dated 23 April 2014, the last confirmed working capture of the site. A later snapshot from around 23 February 2015 instead returns only a database connection error, indicating the underlying BOINC server had gone offline sometime in the intervening months.<ref name="shutdown-note" /> No working snapshot of the project has been found after this point, and Taiwan Desktop Grid is treated here as a completed, discontinued BOINC project.

== Purpose ==
Because Taiwan Desktop Grid functioned primarily as a bridging node rather than hosting a single dedicated in-house research application, its research focus was largely defined by whichever applications were routed to it through the shared EDGeS, DEGISCO and IDGF infrastructure. According to the project's own description, this included applications supporting drug discovery, earthquake simulation and climate change research developed in Asia, as well as applications developed more broadly by IDGF members.<ref name="asgcdg-about" />

== Applications ==
The following applications were recorded on Taiwan Desktop Grid's application list as of an archived snapshot dated 25 August 2012. Installation dates refer to when each application version was first made available on the server, not necessarily when it remained actively assigning work; by the project's own account, many of these applications may not have stayed active for long.<ref name="asgcdg-apps" />

{| class="wikitable"
! Application !! Earliest recorded installation !! Supported platforms
|-
| upperCASE || — || —
|-
| Protein Molecule Simulation Application || 12 April 2011 || Linux (x86, x86_64/EM64T)
|-
| 3D Rendering Application || 28 October 2010 || Windows, Linux (x86, x86_64/EM64T)
|-
| Laser Application || 29 October 2010 || Windows, Linux (x86, x86_64/EM64T)
|-
| BinSys || 17 February 2011 || Windows (x86, x86_64/EM64T), Linux (x86), macOS (10.4+ Intel, 10.5+ 64-bit)
|-
| Patient Readmission Application || 21 February 2011 || Windows, Linux (x86)
|-
| Digital Alias-free Signal Processing Application || 17 February 2011 || Windows, Linux (x86, x86_64/EM64T)
|-
| [[SIMAP|SIMAP Utility Application]] || 17 February 2011 || Windows, Linux (x86, x86_64/EM64T)
|-
| UC-Explorer || 17 February 2011 || Windows, Linux (x86), macOS (10.4+ Intel, 10.5+ 64-bit)
|-
| VisIVO Server Application || 17 February 2011 || Windows, Linux (x86, x86_64/EM64T)
|-
| X-Ray Application || 17 February 2011 || Windows, Linux (x86, x86_64/EM64T)
|-
| merlin || 17 February 2011 || Linux (x86)
|-
| E-Marketplace Model Integrated with Logistics DG || 17 February 2011 || Windows, Linux (x86)
|-
| Fusion ITER || 3 May 2011 || Windows, Linux (x86, x86_64/EM64T)
|-
| AutoDock3 on cell worker || 11 April 2011 || Linux (x86, x86_64/EM64T)
|-
| CORSIKA Application || 17 June 2011 || Windows, Linux (x86)
|-
| AutoDock 3 || 18 May 2012 || Windows, Linux (x86, x86_64/EM64T)
|-
| Grid Virtual Screening Service || 20 April 2012 || Windows, Linux (x86, x86_64/EM64T)
|}

Several of these, including the CORSIKA cosmic ray shower simulator, the AutoDock molecular docking tools and Fusion ITER, correspond to standard applications distributed through the EDGeS/DEGISCO shared application repository, and were also bridged to other desktop grids connected to the same European service grid infrastructure rather than being developed specifically for Taiwan Desktop Grid.<ref name="degisco-cordis" />

== See also ==
* [[wikipedia:BOINC|BOINC]]
* [[wikipedia:Desktop grid computing|Desktop grid computing]]
* [[wikipedia:Worldwide LHC Computing Grid|Worldwide LHC Computing Grid]]
* [[LHC@home]]

==References==
{{Reflist}}

[[Category:BOINC projects]]
[[Category:Completed BOINC projects]]
[[Category:Grid computing]]
[[Category:2010 establishments in Taiwan]]

Main Page

Al Piskun — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:46:40 GMT

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BOINC projects

Al Piskun — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:45:46 GMT

Add BOINC@TACC See more...

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	\| Aerospace engineering, computational biology, and earthquake engineering.		\| Aerospace engineering, computational biology, and earthquake engineering. [[BOINC@TACC\|See more...]]

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Main Page

Al Piskun — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:39:51 GMT

add BOINC@TACC

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	\|* [[Big and Ugly Rendering Project]] distributed video rendering		\|* [[Big and Ugly Rendering Project]] distributed video rendering
			\|* [[BOINC@TACC]] routes computing jobs from TACC supercomputers to volunteer devices
			\|-
	\|* [[CAS@home]] hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, best known for running the TreeThreader protein structure		\|* [[CAS@home]] hosted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, best known for running the TreeThreader protein structure
			\|
	\|-		\|-
	\|* [[Chess960@home]] an effort to build the beginnings of an opening theory for the variant		\|* [[Chess960@home]] an effort to build the beginnings of an opening theory for the variant

BOINC projects

Al Piskun — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 21:34:25 GMT

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BOINC@TACC

Al Piskun — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:57:02 GMT

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	\| caption = The University of Texas at Austin, home to the Texas Advanced Computing Center		\| caption = The University of Texas at Austin, home to the Texas Advanced Computing Center
	\| description = BOINC@TACC is a volunteer computing project operated by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin that routes high-throughput computing jobs from TACC supercomputers to volunteered desktops, laptops, tablets, and cloud virtual machines.		\| description = BOINC@TACC is a volunteer computing project operated by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin that routes high-throughput computing jobs from TACC supercomputers to volunteered desktops, laptops, tablets, and cloud virtual machines.
	\| status = ~~Complete~~		\| status = Completed
	\| category = Multidisciplinary (aerospace engineering, computational biology, earthquake engineering, bioinformatics)		\| category = Multidisciplinary (aerospace engineering, computational biology, earthquake engineering, bioinformatics)
	\| compute = CPU & GPU		\| compute = CPU & GPU
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	\| maintainer = BOINC@TACC project team, Texas Advanced Computing Center		\| maintainer = BOINC@TACC project team, Texas Advanced Computing Center
	\| released = 2017 (as TACC-2-BOINC); renamed BOINC@TACC on {{Start date and age\|2019\|01\|01}}		\| released = 2017 (as TACC-2-BOINC); renamed BOINC@TACC on {{Start date and age\|2019\|01\|01}}
	\| completed = No		\| completed =
	\| discontinued = {{Start date and age\|2022\|07\|11}}		\| discontinued = {{Start date and age\|2022\|07\|11}}
	\| repository = {{URL\|https://github.com/ritua2/BOINCatTACC}}		\| repository = {{URL\|https://github.com/ritua2/BOINCatTACC}}
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	}}		}}

	'''BOINC@TACC''' is a [[volunteer computing]] project operated by the [[Texas Advanced Computing Center]] (TACC) at the [[University of Texas at Austin]] that integrates [[BOINC]]-based volunteer computing with supercomputing and cloud computing.<ref>{{Cite web \|authors=Texas Advanced Computing Center \|title=About BOINC@TACC \|url=https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/about.php \|work=boinc.tacc.utexas.edu \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Rather than running scientific applications directly on TACC's supercomputers, the project routes qualified High-Throughput Computing (HTC) jobs from TACC systems such as [[Stampede2]] to computing resources donated by volunteers, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and cloud-based virtual machines.<ref>{{Cite web \|authors=Texas Advanced Computing Center \|title=BOINC@TACC \|url=https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/ \|work=boinc.tacc.utexas.edu \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Launched in 2017, BOINC@TACC was the first use of volunteer computing by a major high-performance computing center.<ref name="hpcwire">{{Cite web \|authors=Iriarte, Mariana \|title=Science Enthusiasts, Researchers, Students Benefit from Volunteer Computing Using BOINC@TACC \|url=https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/science-enthusiasts-researchers-students-benefit-from-wolunteer-computing-using-boinctacc/ \|work=HPCwire \|date=2019-06-25 \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>		'''[https://web.archive.org/web/20220711171713/https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/ BOINC@TACC]''' is a [[volunteer computing]] project operated by the [[Texas Advanced Computing Center]] (TACC) at the [[University of Texas at Austin]] that integrates [[BOINC]]-based volunteer computing with supercomputing and cloud computing.<ref>{{Cite web \|authors=Texas Advanced Computing Center \|title=About BOINC@TACC \|url=https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/about.php \|work=boinc.tacc.utexas.edu \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Rather than running scientific applications directly on TACC's supercomputers, the project routes qualified High-Throughput Computing (HTC) jobs from TACC systems such as [[Stampede2]] to computing resources donated by volunteers, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and cloud-based virtual machines.<ref>{{Cite web \|authors=Texas Advanced Computing Center \|title=BOINC@TACC \|url=https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/ \|work=boinc.tacc.utexas.edu \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Launched in 2017, BOINC@TACC was the first use of volunteer computing by a major high-performance computing center.<ref name="hpcwire">{{Cite web \|authors=Iriarte, Mariana \|title=Science Enthusiasts, Researchers, Students Benefit from Volunteer Computing Using BOINC@TACC \|url=https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/science-enthusiasts-researchers-students-benefit-from-wolunteer-computing-using-boinctacc/ \|work=HPCwire \|date=2019-06-25 \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>

	== Overview ==		== Overview ==
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	== History ==		== History ==
	After several live iterations, the project began operating in 2017 under the name '''TACC-2-BOINC'''.<ref name="github">{{Cite web \|authors=Arora, Ritu \|title=ritua2/BOINCatTACC \|url=https://github.com/ritua2/BOINCatTACC \|work=GitHub \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> To get started, the TACC team deployed an instance of a BOINC server on a cloud computing platform and then developed the software needed to integrate BOINC with TACC's supercomputing and cloud computing platforms.<ref name="hpcwire" /> On ~~July 30~~, ~~2018~~, the project was renamed BOINC@TACC and moved to its current project URL.<ref name="github" /> The project is funded primarily through [[National Science Foundation\|NSF]] award #1664022, with additional support from [[XSEDE]], TACC, and the Science Gateway Community Institute.<ref>{{Cite web \|authors=Arora, Ritu, Carlos Redondo and Gerald Joshua \|title=Scalable Software Infrastructure for Integrating Supercomputing with Volunteer Computing and Cloud Computing \|url=http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-981-13-7729-7_8 \|work=Software Challenges to Exascale Computing \|date=2019 \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Contributors to the BOINC@TACC codebase have included Carlos Redondo, an aerospace engineering student and developer on the project, along with Thomas Johnson and Anubhaw Nand, with additional input from [[BOINC]] founder [[David P. Anderson\|David Anderson]].<ref>{{Cite web \|authors=Arora, Ritu, Carlos Redondo and Gerald Joshua \|title=Scalable Software Infrastructure for Integrating Supercomputing with Volunteer Computing and Cloud Computing \|url=http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-981-13-7729-7_8 \|work=Software Challenges to Exascale Computing \|date=2019 \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>		After several live iterations, the project began operating in 2017 under the name '''TACC-2-BOINC'''.<ref name="github">{{Cite web \|authors=Arora, Ritu \|title=ritua2/BOINCatTACC \|url=https://github.com/ritua2/BOINCatTACC \|work=GitHub \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> To get started, the TACC team deployed an instance of a BOINC server on a cloud computing platform and then developed the software needed to integrate BOINC with TACC's supercomputing and cloud computing platforms.<ref name="hpcwire" /> On Jan 1, 2019, the project was renamed BOINC@TACC and moved to its current project URL.<ref name="github" /> The project is funded primarily through [[National Science Foundation\|NSF]] award #1664022, with additional support from [[XSEDE]], TACC, and the Science Gateway Community Institute.<ref>{{Cite web \|authors=Arora, Ritu, Carlos Redondo and Gerald Joshua \|title=Scalable Software Infrastructure for Integrating Supercomputing with Volunteer Computing and Cloud Computing \|url=http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-981-13-7729-7_8 \|work=Software Challenges to Exascale Computing \|date=2019 \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Contributors to the BOINC@TACC codebase have included Carlos Redondo, an aerospace engineering student and developer on the project, along with Thomas Johnson and Anubhaw Nand, with additional input from [[BOINC]] founder [[David P. Anderson\|David Anderson]].<ref>{{Cite web \|authors=Arora, Ritu, Carlos Redondo and Gerald Joshua \|title=Scalable Software Infrastructure for Integrating Supercomputing with Volunteer Computing and Cloud Computing \|url=http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-981-13-7729-7_8 \|work=Software Challenges to Exascale Computing \|date=2019 \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>

	== Software infrastructure ==		== Software infrastructure ==
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	Volunteers can join BOINC@TACC either by attaching the standard [[BOINC]] client to the project (requiring [[VirtualBox]] for virtual-machine-based tasks), or, for donors offering cloud-based virtual machines, by using the project's alternative VolCon software.<ref>{{Cite web \|authors=Texas Advanced Computing Center \|title=About BOINC@TACC \|url=https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/about.php \|work=boinc.tacc.utexas.edu \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Researchers eligible to submit jobs include TACC users, researchers from any of the 14 University of Texas System institutions, and, historically, researchers accessing TACC resources through [[XSEDE]].<ref name="hpcwire" />		Volunteers can join BOINC@TACC either by attaching the standard [[BOINC]] client to the project (requiring [[VirtualBox]] for virtual-machine-based tasks), or, for donors offering cloud-based virtual machines, by using the project's alternative VolCon software.<ref>{{Cite web \|authors=Texas Advanced Computing Center \|title=About BOINC@TACC \|url=https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/about.php \|work=boinc.tacc.utexas.edu \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Researchers eligible to submit jobs include TACC users, researchers from any of the 14 University of Texas System institutions, and, historically, researchers accessing TACC resources through [[XSEDE]].<ref name="hpcwire" />

	[[File:Boinc client rosetta climateprediction net.jpg\|thumb\|A BOINC Manager client showing tasks attached from multiple BOINC projects; volunteers use the same client software to contribute to BOINC@TACC]]		[[File:Boinc client rosetta climateprediction net.jpg\|thumb\|A BOINC Manager client showing tasks attached from multiple BOINC projects; volunteers use the same client software to contribute to BOINC@TACC\|364x364px]]

	== Publications ==		== Publications ==
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	# Arora, Ritu, Carlos Redondo and Gerald Joshua. [http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-981-13-7729-7_8 Scalable Software Infrastructure for Integrating Supercomputing with Volunteer Computing and Cloud Computing]. ''Software Challenges to Exascale Computing'' (2019).		# Arora, Ritu, Carlos Redondo and Gerald Joshua. [http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-981-13-7729-7_8 Scalable Software Infrastructure for Integrating Supercomputing with Volunteer Computing and Cloud Computing]. ''Software Challenges to Exascale Computing'' (2019).
	# Wilson, Lucas A and David P Anderson. [http://rgdoi.net/10.13140/RG.2.2.28139.64805 VAST: Integrating Volunteer Computing into Existing Cyberinfrastructure]. (2017). DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28139.64805.		# Wilson, Lucas A and David P Anderson. [http://rgdoi.net/10.13140/RG.2.2.28139.64805 VAST: Integrating Volunteer Computing into Existing Cyberinfrastructure]. (2017). DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28139.64805.

	~~=== Other publications ===~~
	No additional peer-reviewed publications specifically about BOINC@TACC were identified beyond the three listed above and on the BOINC project publications page as of this writing. Related conference material by the project team, including presentations on the ''nanoHUB@home'' collaboration and general TACC volunteer-computing outreach, has appeared in TACC and NSF project reports but does not constitute a separate peer-reviewed publication about BOINC@TACC itself.<ref>{{Cite web \|authors=NSF Public Access Repository \|title=nanoHUB@home: Expanding nanoHUB Through Volunteer Computing \|url=https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10143977-nanohub-home-expanding-nanohubthroughvolunteer-computing \|work=par.nsf.gov \|access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>

	== See also ==		== See also ==

BOINC@TACC

Al Piskun — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:32:55 GMT

first light

New page

{{Infobox software
| name = BOINC@TACC
| logo = Boinc-tacc.jpg
| logo caption = BOINC@TACC logo
| screenshot = UT Tower, University of Texas in Austin.jpg
| caption = The University of Texas at Austin, home to the Texas Advanced Computing Center
| description = BOINC@TACC is a volunteer computing project operated by the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin that routes high-throughput computing jobs from TACC supercomputers to volunteered desktops, laptops, tablets, and cloud virtual machines.
| status = Complete
| category = Multidisciplinary (aerospace engineering, computational biology, earthquake engineering, bioinformatics)
| compute = CPU & GPU
| dependencies = VirtualBox, Docker
| developer = [[Texas Advanced Computing Center]], University of Texas at Austin
| author = Ritu Arora
| sponsor = [[National Science Foundation]] (award #1664022)
| maintainer = BOINC@TACC project team, Texas Advanced Computing Center
| released = 2017 (as TACC-2-BOINC); renamed BOINC@TACC on {{Start date and age|2019|01|01}}
| completed = No
| discontinued = {{Start date and age|2022|07|11}}
| repository = {{URL|https://github.com/ritua2/BOINCatTACC}}
| programming language = PHP, Python, Shell, C++
| operating system = Windows, Linux, macOS (BOINC client); Docker-based for cloud volunteers
| size =
| stats as of =
| average performance =
| active users =
| total users =
| active hosts =
| total hosts =
| rac =
| credit per day =
| gpu performance =
| cpu performance =
| website = {{URL|https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/}}
| license = LGPL-3.0
}}

'''BOINC@TACC''' is a [[volunteer computing]] project operated by the [[Texas Advanced Computing Center]] (TACC) at the [[University of Texas at Austin]] that integrates [[BOINC]]-based volunteer computing with supercomputing and cloud computing.<ref>{{Cite web |authors=Texas Advanced Computing Center |title=About BOINC@TACC |url=https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/about.php |work=boinc.tacc.utexas.edu |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Rather than running scientific applications directly on TACC's supercomputers, the project routes qualified High-Throughput Computing (HTC) jobs from TACC systems such as [[Stampede2]] to computing resources donated by volunteers, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and cloud-based virtual machines.<ref>{{Cite web |authors=Texas Advanced Computing Center |title=BOINC@TACC |url=https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/ |work=boinc.tacc.utexas.edu |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Launched in 2017, BOINC@TACC was the first use of volunteer computing by a major high-performance computing center.<ref name="hpcwire">{{Cite web |authors=Iriarte, Mariana |title=Science Enthusiasts, Researchers, Students Benefit from Volunteer Computing Using BOINC@TACC |url=https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/science-enthusiasts-researchers-students-benefit-from-wolunteer-computing-using-boinctacc/ |work=HPCwire |date=2019-06-25 |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>

== Overview ==
BOINC@TACC allows researchers with TACC or [[XSEDE]] allocations to run small, loosely coupled high-throughput jobs on volunteered hardware instead of spending their supercomputer allocation time on them.<ref>{{Cite web |authors=XSEDE |title=User News: BOINC@TACC |url=https://www.xsede.org/news/user-news/-/news/item/11493 |work=xsede.org |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> The project's stated goal is to free up TACC's supercomputers for tightly coupled, compute- and memory-intensive parallel jobs by offloading independent, "embarrassingly parallel" work to a [[BOINC]] server that, in turn, distributes it to volunteer clients.<ref name="hpcwire" /> The project's lead is Ritu Arora, a research scientist at TACC.<ref name="hpcwire" /> BOINC@TACC has supported research spanning aerospace engineering, computational biology, and earthquake engineering, among other domains.<ref>{{Cite web |authors=Texas Advanced Computing Center |title=About BOINC@TACC |url=https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/about.php |work=boinc.tacc.utexas.edu |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>

Volunteers can contribute either by running the standard [[BOINC]] client (which requires VirtualBox for the project's virtual-machine-based jobs) or, for institutional donors with cloud virtual machines, an alternative Docker-based mechanism developed specifically for the project.<ref>{{Cite web |authors=Arora, Ritu |title=ritua2/BOINCatTACC |url=https://github.com/ritua2/BOINCatTACC |work=GitHub |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Task availability on BOINC@TACC has historically been intermittent, since work is generated only as TACC researchers submit qualifying jobs rather than on a continuous schedule; during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, volunteers reported a batch of virtual-machine-based tasks related to COVID-19 research becoming briefly available.<ref>{{Cite web |authors=AnandTech Forums |title=BOINC@TACC has work |url=https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/boinc-tacc-has-work.2579094/ |work=AnandTech Forums |date=2020-04-06 |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>

== History ==
After several live iterations, the project began operating in 2017 under the name '''TACC-2-BOINC'''.<ref name="github">{{Cite web |authors=Arora, Ritu |title=ritua2/BOINCatTACC |url=https://github.com/ritua2/BOINCatTACC |work=GitHub |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> To get started, the TACC team deployed an instance of a BOINC server on a cloud computing platform and then developed the software needed to integrate BOINC with TACC's supercomputing and cloud computing platforms.<ref name="hpcwire" /> On July 30, 2018, the project was renamed BOINC@TACC and moved to its current project URL.<ref name="github" /> The project is funded primarily through [[National Science Foundation|NSF]] award #1664022, with additional support from [[XSEDE]], TACC, and the Science Gateway Community Institute.<ref>{{Cite web |authors=Arora, Ritu, Carlos Redondo and Gerald Joshua |title=Scalable Software Infrastructure for Integrating Supercomputing with Volunteer Computing and Cloud Computing |url=http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-981-13-7729-7_8 |work=Software Challenges to Exascale Computing |date=2019 |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Contributors to the BOINC@TACC codebase have included Carlos Redondo, an aerospace engineering student and developer on the project, along with Thomas Johnson and Anubhaw Nand, with additional input from [[BOINC]] founder [[David P. Anderson|David Anderson]].<ref>{{Cite web |authors=Arora, Ritu, Carlos Redondo and Gerald Joshua |title=Scalable Software Infrastructure for Integrating Supercomputing with Volunteer Computing and Cloud Computing |url=http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-981-13-7729-7_8 |work=Software Challenges to Exascale Computing |date=2019 |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>

== Software infrastructure ==
The BOINC@TACC codebase, hosted on [[GitHub]] under the LGPL-3.0 license, builds on the ''boinc-server-docker'' software originally developed by Marius Millea and extends it with several project-specific components.<ref name="github" />

=== Job routing and application deployment ===
A command-line back-end, ''stampede2-backend'', runs on Stampede2 and other TACC [[SLURM]]-scheduled Linux systems to determine whether a submitted job is eligible to run on volunteered BOINC clients rather than on TACC resources.<ref name="github" /> Researchers can also submit and track jobs through a web-based user interface built for the project.<ref name="github" /> Applications are packaged as Docker images through a component called MIDAS, which automatically generates Docker containers from source code so they can run either inside [[VirtualBox]] on traditional BOINC clients or directly inside Docker on volunteered cloud virtual machines through a mechanism called VolCon.<ref name="github" /> Pre-built Docker images maintained by the project team have included [[AutoDock]] Vina, [[BEDTools]], [[BLAST (biotechnology)|BLAST]], [[Bowtie (sequence analysis)|Bowtie]], [[GROMACS]], HTSeq, [[LAMMPS]], [[NAMD]], and [[OpenSees]].<ref>{{Cite web |authors=Texas Advanced Computing Center |title=About BOINC@TACC |url=https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/about.php |work=boinc.tacc.utexas.edu |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>

=== Reef cloud storage ===
Result files produced by BOINC@TACC jobs are stored using ''Reef'', a lightweight, reusable cloud storage component built for the project (also described in the literature under the name ''Greyfish''). Reef can be deployed either as a single storage node ("pocket Reef") or, for larger workloads, as a distributed system with a manager node and one or more remote storage nodes.<ref name="github" />

=== Credit system ===
Like other BOINC projects, BOINC@TACC computes each volunteer's Recent Average Credit (RAC) as an exponentially weighted moving average that gives more weight to recently granted credit and decays older contributions with a half-life of one week. Following BOINC's general credit-accounting scheme, whenever new credit <math>c</math> is granted at a time interval <math>\Delta t</math> after the previous update, the RAC is recalculated as

<math>\text{RAC}_{\text{new}} = \text{RAC}_{\text{old}} \cdot e^{-\Delta t \ln 2 / T} + \frac{c}{T}\left(1 - e^{-\Delta t \ln 2 / T}\right)</math>

where <math>T</math> is the credit half-life (seven days).<ref>{{Cite web |authors=Anderson, David P. |title=BOINC: A Platform for Volunteer Computing |url=https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.01699 |work=arXiv |date=2019 |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |authors=BOINC |title=CreditStats |url=https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/wiki/CreditStats |work=GitHub |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> As with several smaller BOINC projects, BOINC@TACC has not published its statistics through third-party aggregators such as [[BOINCstats]] or Free-DC, so detailed current figures for active users, hosts, and average performance are not publicly available.<ref>{{Cite web |authors=AnandTech Forums |title=BOINC@TACC has work |url=https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/boinc-tacc-has-work.2579094/ |work=AnandTech Forums |date=2020-04-06 |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>

== Volunteering ==
Volunteers can join BOINC@TACC either by attaching the standard [[BOINC]] client to the project (requiring [[VirtualBox]] for virtual-machine-based tasks), or, for donors offering cloud-based virtual machines, by using the project's alternative VolCon software.<ref>{{Cite web |authors=Texas Advanced Computing Center |title=About BOINC@TACC |url=https://boinc.tacc.utexas.edu/about.php |work=boinc.tacc.utexas.edu |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref> Researchers eligible to submit jobs include TACC users, researchers from any of the 14 University of Texas System institutions, and, historically, researchers accessing TACC resources through [[XSEDE]].<ref name="hpcwire" />

[[File:Boinc client rosetta climateprediction net.jpg|thumb|A BOINC Manager client showing tasks attached from multiple BOINC projects; volunteers use the same client software to contribute to BOINC@TACC]]

== Publications ==
The following papers, describing the BOINC@TACC project and its software infrastructure, are listed on the official [[BOINC]] project publications page.<ref>{{Cite web |authors=Piskun, Alex |title=Publications by BOINC Projects: BOINC@TACC |url=https://boinc.berkeley.edu/pubs.php |work=boinc.berkeley.edu |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>

=== Papers describing the project ===
# Redondo, Carlos and Ritu Arora. [https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3332186.3333055 Greyfish: An Out-of-the-Box, Reusable, Portable Cloud Storage Service]. ''PEARC '19: Practice and Experience in Advanced Research Computing'' (2019). DOI: 10.1145/3332186.3333055.
# Arora, Ritu, Carlos Redondo and Gerald Joshua. [http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-981-13-7729-7_8 Scalable Software Infrastructure for Integrating Supercomputing with Volunteer Computing and Cloud Computing]. ''Software Challenges to Exascale Computing'' (2019).
# Wilson, Lucas A and David P Anderson. [http://rgdoi.net/10.13140/RG.2.2.28139.64805 VAST: Integrating Volunteer Computing into Existing Cyberinfrastructure]. (2017). DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28139.64805.

=== Other publications ===
No additional peer-reviewed publications specifically about BOINC@TACC were identified beyond the three listed above and on the BOINC project publications page as of this writing. Related conference material by the project team, including presentations on the ''nanoHUB@home'' collaboration and general TACC volunteer-computing outreach, has appeared in TACC and NSF project reports but does not constitute a separate peer-reviewed publication about BOINC@TACC itself.<ref>{{Cite web |authors=NSF Public Access Repository |title=nanoHUB@home: Expanding nanoHUB Through Volunteer Computing |url=https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10143977-nanohub-home-expanding-nanohubthroughvolunteer-computing |work=par.nsf.gov |access-date=2026-07-22}}</ref>

== See also ==
* [[BOINC]]
* [[Texas Advanced Computing Center]]
* [[Volunteer computing]]
* [[World Community Grid]]

==References==
{{Reflist}}

[[Category:BOINC projects]]
[[Category:Volunteer computing]]
[[Category:Texas Advanced Computing Center]]

File:Boinc-tacc.jpg

Al Piskun — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:12:28 GMT

Al Piskun uploaded File:Boinc-tacc.jpg BOINC@TACC logo

New page

== Summary ==
BOINC@TACC logo

SPT

Al Piskun — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:48:17 GMT

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:48, 21 July 2026
(One intermediate revision by the same user not shown)
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	\| logo caption = SPT project logo		\| logo caption = SPT project logo

	\| status = ~~Active~~		\| status = Inactive
	\| category = Mathematics / Number Theory		\| category = Mathematics / Number Theory
	\| compute = CPU		\| compute = CPU
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	\| sponsor = Natalia Makarova, Alex Belyshev, Tomáš Brada		\| sponsor = Natalia Makarova, Alex Belyshev, Tomáš Brada
	\| maintainer = Natalia Makarova, Alex Belyshev, Tomáš Brada		\| maintainer = Natalia Makarova, Alex Belyshev, Tomáš Brada
	\| released = 2023		\| released = {{Start date and age\|2023\|06\|14}}
			\| completed = No
			\| discontinued = {{Start date and age\|2025\|02\|19}}

	\| programming language = C, C++		\| programming language = C, C++
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	\| website = {{URL\|https://boinc.termit.me/adsl/}}		\| website = {{URL\|https://boinc.termit.me/adsl/}}
	}}		}}

	~~[[File:BOINC logo.png\|right\|frameless\|150x150px\|BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, is the platform that powers SPT.]]~~

	[https://boinc.termit.me/adsl/ '''''SPT'''''] ('''Symmetric Prime Tuples''') is a [[wikipedia:BOINC\|BOINC]]-based [[wikipedia:Volunteer computing\|volunteer computing]] project dedicated to researching symmetric [[wikipedia:Prime k-tuple\|prime k-tuples]] of consecutive primes, a topic in [[wikipedia:Number theory\|number theory]]. Volunteers donate idle CPU time on their personal computers to help systematically search for symmetric prime k-tuples, advancing an open mathematical problem first formally presented by mathematician Natalia Makarova. The project is hosted at <code>boinc.termit.me/adsl/</code> and serves as the direct continuation of an earlier lineage of BOINC projects pursuing the same mathematical goal.		[https://boinc.termit.me/adsl/ '''''SPT'''''] ('''Symmetric Prime Tuples''') is a [[wikipedia:BOINC\|BOINC]]-based [[wikipedia:Volunteer computing\|volunteer computing]] project dedicated to researching symmetric [[wikipedia:Prime k-tuple\|prime k-tuples]] of consecutive primes, a topic in [[wikipedia:Number theory\|number theory]]. Volunteers donate idle CPU time on their personal computers to help systematically search for symmetric prime k-tuples, advancing an open mathematical problem first formally presented by mathematician Natalia Makarova. The project is hosted at <code>boinc.termit.me/adsl/</code> and serves as the direct continuation of an earlier lineage of BOINC projects pursuing the same mathematical goal.
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	== Background and History ==		== Background and History ==

	[[File:Ulam 1.png\|thumb\|~~right\|220px~~\|The [[wikipedia:Ulam spiral\|Ulam spiral]], a visualisation of the distribution of prime numbers. SPT investigates a specific structural property of consecutive primes: whether they can be arranged in symmetric patterns.]]		[[File:Ulam 1.png\|thumb\|296x296px\|The [[wikipedia:Ulam spiral\|Ulam spiral]], a visualisation of the distribution of prime numbers. SPT investigates a specific structural property of consecutive primes: whether they can be arranged in symmetric patterns.]]

	The search for symmetric prime tuples has a rich history within the volunteer computing community. The research lineage traces back to '''Stop@Home''', an early BOINC project that searched for symmetric prime sequences.<ref>{{cite web \|url=http://www.primepuzzles.net/problems/prob_062.htm \|title=Problem 62. Symmetric k-tuples of consecutive primes \|publisher=primepuzzles.net \|access-date=2026-05-23}}</ref> Stop@Home achieved a notable result: in April 2017, the project's volunteers discovered a minimal symmetric 17-tuple with starting prime <math>p = 159{,}067{,}808{,}851{,}610{,}411</math> and offsets 0, 42, 60, 96, 102, 186, 210, 240, 246, 252, 282, 306, 390, 396, 432, 450, 492.<ref>{{cite web \|url=http://www.primepuzzles.net/problems/prob_062.htm \|title=Problem 62. Symmetric k-tuples of consecutive primes \|publisher=primepuzzles.net \|access-date=2026-05-23}}</ref>		The search for symmetric prime tuples has a rich history within the volunteer computing community. The research lineage traces back to '''Stop@Home''', an early BOINC project that searched for symmetric prime sequences.<ref>{{cite web \|url=http://www.primepuzzles.net/problems/prob_062.htm \|title=Problem 62. Symmetric k-tuples of consecutive primes \|publisher=primepuzzles.net \|access-date=2026-05-23}}</ref> Stop@Home achieved a notable result: in April 2017, the project's volunteers discovered a minimal symmetric 17-tuple with starting prime <math>p = 159{,}067{,}808{,}851{,}610{,}411</math> and offsets 0, 42, 60, 96, 102, 186, 210, 240, 246, 252, 282, 306, 390, 396, 432, 450, 492.<ref>{{cite web \|url=http://www.primepuzzles.net/problems/prob_062.htm \|title=Problem 62. Symmetric k-tuples of consecutive primes \|publisher=primepuzzles.net \|access-date=2026-05-23}}</ref>
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	=== Definition 4: Diameter ===		=== Definition 4: Diameter ===

			[[File:BOINC logo.png\|right\|frameless\|150x150px\|BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, is the platform that powers SPT.]]

	The '''diameter''' <math>d</math> of a k-tuple is the difference between its largest and smallest offsets:<ref>{{cite web \|url=http://oeis.org/A055380 \|title=OEIS A055380 \|publisher=The OEIS Foundation \|access-date=2026-05-23}}</ref>		The '''diameter''' <math>d</math> of a k-tuple is the difference between its largest and smallest offsets:<ref>{{cite web \|url=http://oeis.org/A055380 \|title=OEIS A055380 \|publisher=The OEIS Foundation \|access-date=2026-05-23}}</ref>
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	== Known Solutions ==		== Known Solutions ==

	[[File:Sieve of Eratosthenes animation.gif\|thumb\|~~right\|220px~~\|The [[wikipedia:Sieve of Eratosthenes\|Sieve of Eratosthenes]], the classical prime-finding algorithm underlying the modern primesieve library used by SPT.]]		[[File:Sieve of Eratosthenes animation.gif\|thumb\|296x296px\|The [[wikipedia:Sieve of Eratosthenes\|Sieve of Eratosthenes]], the classical prime-finding algorithm underlying the modern primesieve library used by SPT.]]

	The table below summarises the best known solutions for various values of <math>k</math>, as published on the project's reference page.<ref>{{cite web \|url=http://www.primepuzzles.net/problems/prob_062.htm \|title=Problem 62. Symmetric k-tuples of consecutive primes \|publisher=primepuzzles.net \|access-date=2026-05-23}}</ref> Solutions marked "not minimal" indicate that a smaller starting prime <math>p</math> or smaller diameter may still exist. Results were discovered across Stop@Home, TBEG, manual computation by contributors such as J. Wroblewski and two anonymous Russian contributors, and the ongoing SPT project.		The table below summarises the best known solutions for various values of <math>k</math>, as published on the project's reference page.<ref>{{cite web \|url=http://www.primepuzzles.net/problems/prob_062.htm \|title=Problem 62. Symmetric k-tuples of consecutive primes \|publisher=primepuzzles.net \|access-date=2026-05-23}}</ref> Solutions marked "not minimal" indicate that a smaller starting prime <math>p</math> or smaller diameter may still exist. Results were discovered across Stop@Home, TBEG, manual computation by contributors such as J. Wroblewski and two anonymous Russian contributors, and the ongoing SPT project.