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| developer            = [[wikipedia:David P. Anderson|David P. Anderson]], [[wikipedia:University of California, Berkeley|University of California, Berkeley]] Space Sciences Laboratory
| developer            = [[wikipedia:David P. Anderson|David P. Anderson]], [[wikipedia:University of California, Berkeley|University of California, Berkeley]] Space Sciences Laboratory
| released            = {{Start date and age|2021|11|26}}
| released            = {{Start date and age|2021|11|26}}  
| latest release date  =
 
| operating system    = Cross-platform (via [[BOINC]] client
| completed            = Boolean Chains
| completed            = No
| discontinued        =
| discontinued        =
| repository          =  
| repository          =  
Line 37: Line 36:
| license              = Open-source software ([[wikipedia:GNU Lesser General Public License|LGPL]])
| license              = Open-source software ([[wikipedia:GNU Lesser General Public License|LGPL]])
}}
}}
[[File:{{#setmainimage:BOINC_central.png}}|alt=BOINC Central|center|frameless]]


[https://boinc.berkeley.edu/central/ '''''BOINC Central'''''] is a BOINC project. A system for '''''[[Wikipedia:Volunteer computing|volunteer computing]]''''', allowing people around the world to donate computing power to science research.
[https://boinc.berkeley.edu/central/ '''''BOINC Central'''''] is a BOINC project. A system for '''''[[Wikipedia:Volunteer computing|volunteer computing]]''''', allowing people around the world to donate computing power to science research.

Latest revision as of 13:26, 29 May 2026





BOINC Central
Project
StatusActive
CategoryMulti-project
ComputeCPU
RequiresBUDA
Development
DeveloperDavid P. Anderson, University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory
Initial releaseNovember 26, 2021  (5 years ago)
CompletedBoolean Chains
Software
Written inC, C++
Operating systemWindows, Linux, macOS, Android
Size~50 MB
BOINC statistics
Stats as ofFebruary 25, 2026  (0 years ago)
Performance5721.89 GigaFLOPS
Active users603
Total users953
Active hosts1,139
Total hosts2,235
Metadata
Websitehttps://boinc.berkeley.edu/central/
LicenseOpen-source software (LGPL)

BOINC Central is a BOINC project. A system for volunteer computing, allowing people around the world to donate computing power to science research.

Overview

BOINC Central gives scientists access to the power of volunteer computing without having to operate a BOINC server. It was publicly launched on 26 November 2021[1] and is operated by the University of California, Berkeley BOINC project, under the direction of research scientist David P. Anderson.

The BOINC platform, which BOINC Central runs on, was originally developed to support SETI@home.

The project is one of approximately 26 projects listed on BOINC's official roster as of early 2026.[2] Unlike other BOINC projects that serve a single research team, BOINC Central acts as a shared scientific computing service – a central hub where multiple independent scientists can submit workloads without having to build or maintain their own volunteer-computing infrastructure.

Why BOINC Central?

BOINC Central gives scientists access to the power of volunteer computing without having to operate a BOINC server.

Volunteer computing provides enormous computing power to science projects, but creating and operating such a project is expensive and requires resources that most scientists lack.[3] BOINC itself – as an open-source middleware platform – has been used by about 100 projects across medicine, molecular biology, mathematics, linguistics, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics since its founding in 2002, collectively contributing to over 1,000 research papers.[4]

BOINC Central was conceived to extend those benefits to researchers who lack the funding and technical staff to run their own BOINC project, including those whose need for high-throughput computing is sporadic rather than continuous.

Goal

The goal of BOINC Central is to make the power of volunteer computing available to all scientists, including those with little money and technical resources and those whose need for computing is sporadic.

How It Works

Infrastructure

  • BOINC Central is a BOINC project. The BOINC team operates its own server and maintains the project's website, so scientists do not have to.[3]
  • Supported applications. Initially BOINC Central supported AutoDock Vina from the Scripps Research Institute, a widely used open-source program for molecular docking and virtual drug screening.[3] It now also accepts any science application packaged using Docker through the BUDA framework (see below).
  • Cross-platform executables. The team builds application versions for a range of computing platforms: different operating systems, CPU types, and GPU types, so that volunteers' machines can participate regardless of their hardware.
  • Web-based job submission. Scientists from academic research institutions can submit batches of jobs using a web interface by contacting the BOINC Central team to register.[3]

BUDA: BOINC Universal Docker App

BOINC Central's newer projects use BUDA (BOINC Universal Docker App), a framework developed by the BOINC project that allows scientists to run Docker-based applications across the volunteer network.[5] With BUDA, a scientist only needs to package their Linux-based application in a Docker container and submit jobs entirely through the web interface – no knowledge of BOINC internals is required.[6] Both completed BOINC Central sub-projects – Boolean Chains and Cislunar Orbit Stability Analyzer – used BUDA.[7]

Supported Science Applications

  • Any application packaged with Docker
  • AutoDock from the Scripps Research Institute

Sub-Projects

BOINC Central volunteers have provided computing power to the following projects:

Boolean Chains (completed)

Boolean chains

My name is Oliver, I'm interested in maths, computer science, and combinatorial problems.

I've been studying The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth, working on some of the exercises and some of the open problems. In Volume 4A, chapter 7.1.2 the topic of boolean chains comes up. Basically, it's about a chain of boolean operations on some input values x_1, ..., x_n and intermediate results of those operations, such that a set of desired functions f_1, ..., f_m on those inputs can be evaluated. The goal is to make such a chain as small as possible, because that makes for small circuitry with fewer parts.

One example Knuth chose is the segments of a digital display, as we know it from (somewhat dated) alarm clocks or quartz watches. The inputs are the four bits of a number 0 to 15 (we want hexadecimal digits) and the seven output functions are whether each of the segments of the display should be turned on or off for that digit.

The seven-segment display problem: a classic combinatorics challenge that motivated the Boolean Chains project.
The seven-segment display problem: a classic combinatorics challenge that motivated the Boolean Chains project.

My goal is to find the minimal boolean chain for this problem, hoping to come up with some new algorithms or speed improvements to make this feasible; so that similar problems can be solved in the future. I've already found shorter boolean chains with an algorithm described on the website below, but to prove it is optimal I need to do an exhaustive search. I also suspect that there still are chains that are ONE step shorter than the one I found, based on the trajectory of smaller problems already solved, but for that I also need the exhaustive search.

Details of the project: https://orunge.org/boolean-chains/

I've already covered a large search space with my own machine and AWS Batch, but that approach will be too costly.

That's where I hope BOINC Central can help!

Results can be tracked here: https://orunge.org/boolean-chains/#results-full

Milestones and Results

The Boolean Chains project reached a significant milestone in May 2025: the search space for N=15, L=21 was exhausted. Over the course of the project, 37,444,981,252,103,000 chains were generated, consuming 2,139 days of computing time.[8] The project was subsequently completed, with volunteers having supplied the equivalent of 450 CPU-years of computing power.[9]

Technical Infrastructure

AutoDock Vina

AutoDock Vina is used for molecular docking and virtual drug screening.

AutoDock Vina is an open-source program for molecular docking originally designed by Dr. Oleg Trott at the Molecular Graphics Lab (now the Center for Computational Structural Biology, CCSB) at The Scripps Research Institute.[10] It is one of the most widely used tools in computational drug discovery, allowing researchers to predict how small molecules (potential drug candidates) bind to protein receptors. AutoDock Vina achieves roughly a two-orders-of-magnitude speed increase over earlier versions while improving the accuracy of binding mode predictions, and leverages multithreading across CPU cores.[11]

BOINC Central's distributed infrastructure allows researchers to run large virtual screening campaigns – docking thousands of compounds against a protein target – at no cost, using computing power donated by volunteers worldwide.

The BOINC Platform

The BOINC logo. BOINC has been in development since 2002.

BOINC (pronounced /bɔɪŋk/, rhyming with "oink") is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing developed at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. As of 2021 it brought together 34,236 active participants employing 136,341 active computers worldwide, processing on average 20.164 PetaFLOPS daily.[2] It supports applications across medicine, molecular biology, mathematics, linguistics, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics. BOINC Central is listed among the projects available to the Android BOINC mobile client.[2]

Researchers

Name Research interests Location Project
Oliver Runge Computer science, combinatorics Germany Boolean Chains
Lezhe Gao Astrodynamics, cislunar mechanics (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) Cislunar Orbit Stability Analyzer

Project Team / Sponsors

David P. Anderson. Operated by Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

David P. Anderson is an American research scientist at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory and an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Houston. He received a BA in mathematics from Wesleyan University and MS and PhD degrees in mathematics and computer science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.[12]

Anderson has been a pioneer of volunteer computing since the mid-1990s. He co-created SETI@home in 1995 and in 2002 founded the BOINC project, which became the world's leading platform for volunteer computing, funded by the National Science Foundation.[13] BOINC Central is one of his most recent initiatives to make volunteer computing accessible without technical barriers.

The project is operated by and funded through the University of California, Berkeley BOINC project. BOINC itself is supported by the National Science Foundation.

How to Participate

Volunteers can contribute computing power by:

  1. Downloading and installing the BOINC client
  2. Attaching to BOINC Central using its URL: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/central/
  3. The BOINC client will automatically receive, process, and return tasks

BOINC Central is listed as one of the projects compatible with the Android BOINC app. Computing preferences, credit statistics, and GPU/CPU models are managed through the BOINC Central web portal.[14]

Scientists who wish to submit workloads should contact David P. Anderson to register.

See Also

External Links

References

  1. ↑ (26 November 2021}).Welcome to BOINC Central. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 About BOINC Central. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
  4. ↑ David P. Anderson.(26 January 2022}).A brief history of BOINC. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
  5. ↑ BUDA overview. BOINC/GitHub. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
  6. ↑ Computing with BOINC. BOINC/GitHub. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
  7. ↑ (24 March 2026}).BOINC Central news. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
  8. ↑ (31 May 2025}).Boolean Chains project reaches milestone. BOINC Central. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
  9. ↑ (24 March 2026}).BOINC Central project updates. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
  10. ↑ AutoDock Vina. The Scripps Research Institute. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
  11. ↑ (2010}).AutoDock Vina: improving the speed and accuracy of docking with a new scoring function, efficient optimization and multithreading. Journal of Computational Chemistry. pp. 455–461. DOI: 10.1002/jcc.21334.
  12. ↑ David P. Anderson. Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-05-18}}.
  13. ↑ David P. Anderson – Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
  14. ↑ Welcome to BOINC Central. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved 2026-05-18}.
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