Malariacontrol.net

malariacontrol.net
malariacontrol.net Screensaver
Project
Status	Completed
Category	Biology and Medicine
Compute	CPU
Requires	None
Development
Developer	Swiss Tropical Institute (now Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute)
Author	Nicolas Maire, Thomas A. Smith and the Swiss Tropical Institute modelling group
Sponsor	Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Geneva International Academic Network (GIAN)
Maintainer	Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute
Initial release	December 19, 2006  (20 years ago)
Completed	June 21, 2016  (10 years ago)
Software
Written in	C++
Operating system	Windows, Linux, macOS
BOINC statistics
Stats as of	January 1, 2014  (12 years ago)
Performance	12.155 TFLOPS
Active users	7,907
Total users	200,749
Active hosts	29,988
Total hosts	545,517
Analytics
GPU performance	Not applicable
CPU performance	12.155 TFLOPS
Metadata
Website	http://www.malariacontrol.net/

malariacontrol.net was a volunteer computing BOINC project that simulated the transmission dynamics and health effects of malaria in order to help researchers evaluate strategies for controlling the disease across Africa. Run by the Swiss Tropical Institute (now the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Swiss TPH) in Basel, in partnership with the University of Geneva, the project was the founding and only activity of the Africa@home initiative, which had in turn been conceived and developed with help from CERN. malariacontrol.net is generally credited as the first volunteer computing project to model the spread of a human disease. The project ran for roughly a decade before being retired on 21 June 2016.

History

The malariacontrol.net domain name was first registered on 19 May 2005, and the project entered public testing soon afterwards, drawing on preliminary in-house computing at the Swiss Tropical Institute of around 40 machines before it became clear that a much larger pool of computing power would be needed to adequately validate the underlying disease model. The project launched publicly on the BOINC platform in 2006 as part of the broader Africa@home effort, which had been announced on 13 July of that year with backing from the Geneva International Academic Network (GIAN), ICVolunteers, and CERN.

Project scientists estimated that, using thousands of volunteered PCs, malariacontrol.net could complete in a matter of months a volume of computation that would otherwise have taken up to 40 years on the computing resources available in-house to the modelling team. Each work unit simulated a virtual human population of between 50,000 and 100,000 individuals for around an hour on an average home computer, with completed results returned to the University of Geneva for evaluation. The project used stochastic simulation to model the natural history of malaria infection at the individual level, tracking factors such as transmission intensity, immunity, and the effects of interventions like mosquito nets, drug treatment, and candidate vaccines.

As of 2010, the project had approximately 10,000 active volunteers out of more than 37,000 cumulative registered participants, drawn largely from the same demographic as the wider BOINC community: mostly men aged 20–50 living in Europe and North America, who most often learned of the project through the BOINC website itself and cited the satisfaction of contributing to a humanitarian cause as their primary motivation.

Starting on 4 November 2010, with financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the project's underlying simulation model was released as an open-source framework called OpenMalaria, which is still maintained by Swiss TPH and used by malaria modellers worldwide.

Termination

On 21 June 2016, the project's science team announced that malariacontrol.net would not resume sending out work units and confirmed its termination. The announcement explained that, unlike when the project began roughly ten years earlier, volunteer computing was no longer the most efficient or cost-effective way to obtain the simulation throughput required by the modelling team, since improvements in institutional high-performance computing had made dedicated cluster resources available to the group that simply hadn't existed a decade before. The announcement also noted that the staffing profile behind the project had changed over the years, making the continued maintenance of project-specific BOINC server components harder to justify given the scale of investment that would have been required to upgrade them. The malariacontrol.net server was left running for a period afterward without issuing further work, and the project was formally retired from the BOINCstats project listings later that year.

Scientific output

Over its roughly ten years of operation, malariacontrol.net contributed to more than 30 peer-reviewed scientific articles. Areas of study supported by the project's simulations included the comparative effectiveness of candidate malaria vaccines across high- and low-transmission settings, the impact of intermittent preventive treatment with sulfadoxine/pyrimethamine in infants, and the development of a comprehensive individual-based simulation framework for Plasmodium falciparum transmission and control, the foundational paper for what would become OpenMalaria.

A study published in 2012 used the project's simulations to assess the likely benefit of deploying the RTS,S candidate vaccine through the World Health Organization's Expanded Programme on Immunization across a range of transmission settings, concluding that the gains over a 14-year horizon were comparatively modest under routine delivery and that targeted mass vaccination campaigns in low-transmission areas could extract more benefit from the same vaccine. Further work carried out around 2013 examined the diagnostic performance of rapid diagnostic tests and other surveillance tools across high- and low-transmission P. falciparum settings, and found that population-wide screening before treatment could be more cost-effective than indiscriminate mass drug administration. A related 2013 analysis compared pyrethroid-only mosquito nets against nets treated with both pyrethroid and piperonyl butoxide, finding both options to be cost-effective across pyrethroid-susceptible and pyrethroid-resistant mosquito populations.

Many subsequent OpenMalaria-based publications by the Swiss TPH disease modelling group continued to explicitly credit the volunteers of malariacontrol.net for providing the computing capacity behind their simulations, even after the project stopped issuing new work units.

Science Publications

The list below reproduces the malariacontrol.net entries from the official Publications by BOINC Projects page, maintained by Alex Piskun. Each entry links to the article itself. Entries are listed newest first, as on the source page.

1. Penny, Melissa A..(2016).Public health impact and cost-effectiveness of the RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine: a systematic comparison of predictions from four mathematical models. The Lancet. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(15)00725-4.
2. Cameron, Ewan.(2015).Defining the relationship between infection prevalence and clinical incidence of Plasmodium falciparum malaria. Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms9170.
3. Penny, Melissa A..(2015).Distribution of malaria exposure in endemic countries in Africa considering country levels of effective treatment. Malaria Journal. DOI: 10.1186/s12936-015-0864-3.
4. Penny, Melissa A..(2015).The public health impact of malaria vaccine RTS,S in malaria endemic Africa: country-specific predictions using 18 month follow-up Phase III data and simulation models. BMC Medicine. DOI: 10.1186/s12916-015-0408-2.
5. Stuckey, Erin M..(2014).Modeling the Cost Effectiveness of Malaria Control Interventions in the Highlands of Western Kenya. PLoS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107700.
6. Briët, Olivier J. T..(2013).Repeated mass distributions and continuous distribution of long-lasting insecticidal nets: modelling sustainability of health benefits from mosquito nets, depending on case management. Malaria Journal. DOI: 10.1186/1475-2875-12-401.
7. Briët, Olivier J. T..(2013).Effects of changing mosquito host searching behaviour on the cost effectiveness of a mass distribution of long-lasting, insecticidal nets: a modelling study. Malaria Journal. DOI: 10.1186/1475-2875-12-215.
8. Nunes, Julia K..(2013).Modeling the public health impact of malaria vaccines for developers and policymakers. BMC Infectious Diseases. DOI: 10.1186/1471-2334-13-295.
9. Briët, Olivier J. T..(2013).Effects of pyrethroid resistance on the cost effectiveness of a mass distribution of long-lasting insecticidal nets: a modelling study. Malaria Journal. DOI: 10.1186/1475-2875-12-77.
10. Briët, Olivier J. T..(2012).Importance of factors determining the effective lifetime of a mass, long-lasting, insecticidal net distribution: a sensitivity analysis. Malaria Journal. DOI: 10.1186/1475-2875-11-20.
11. Crowell, Valerie.(2012).Can we depend on case management to prevent re-establishment of P. falciparum malaria, after local interruption of transmission?. Epidemics. DOI: 10.1016/j.epidem.2011.10.003.
12. Stuckey, Erin M..(2012).Simulation of malaria epidemiology and control in the highlands of western Kenya. Malaria Journal. DOI: 10.1186/1475-2875-11-357.
13. Smith, Thomas.(2012).Ensemble Modeling of the Likely Public Health Impact of a Pre-Erythrocytic Malaria Vaccine. PLoS Medicine. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001157.
14. Brooks, Alan.(2012).Simulated Impact of RTS,S/AS01 Vaccination Programs in the Context of Changing Malaria Transmission. PLoS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0032587.
15. Maire, Nicolas.(2011).Cost-Effectiveness of the Introduction of a Pre-Erythrocytic Malaria Vaccine into the Expanded Program on Immunization in Sub-Saharan Africa: Analysis of Uncertainties Using a Stochastic Individual-Based Simulation Model of Plasmodium falciparum Malaria. Value in Health. DOI: 10.1016/j.jval.2011.06.004.
16. Smith, Thomas A..(2011).Uses of mosquito-stage transmission-blocking vaccines against Plasmodium falciparum. Trends in Parasitology. DOI: 10.1016/j.pt.2010.12.011.
17. Ross, Amanda.(2011).Determinants of the Cost-Effectiveness of Intermittent Preventive Treatment for Malaria in Infants and Children. PLoS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0018391.
18. Bretscher, Michael T..(2011).The distribution of Plasmodium falciparum infection durations. Epidemics. DOI: 10.1016/j.epidem.2011.03.002.
19. Carneiro, Ilona.(2010).Intermittent preventive treatment for malaria in infants: a decision-support tool for sub-Saharan Africa. Bulletin of the World Health Organization. DOI: 10.2471/BLT.09.072397.
20. Ross, Amanda.(2010).Interpreting malaria age-prevalence and incidence curves: a simulation study of the effects of different types of heterogeneity. Malaria Journal. DOI: 10.1186/1475-2875-9-132.
21. Krebs, Viola.(2010).Motivations of cybervolunteers in an applied distributed computing environment: malariaControl.net as an example. First Monday. DOI: 10.5210/fm.v15i2.2783.
22. Gosoniu, L..(2009).Mapping malaria risk in West Africa using a Bayesian nonparametric non-stationary model. Computational Statistics & Data Analysis. DOI: 10.1016/j.csda.2009.02.022.
23. Tediosi, Fabrizio.(2009).Simulation of the cost-effectiveness of malaria vaccines. Malaria Journal. DOI: 10.1186/1475-2875-8-127.
24. Penny, Melissa A..(2008).What Should Vaccine Developers Ask? Simulation of the Effectiveness of Malaria Vaccines. PLoS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0003193.
25. Smith, T..(2008).Towards a comprehensive simulation model of malaria epidemiology and control. Parasitology. DOI: 10.1017/S0031182008000371.
26. Ross, Amanda.(2008).Modelling the Epidemiological Impact of Intermittent Preventive Treatment against Malaria in Infants. PLoS ONE. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002661.

Technology

malariacontrol.net distributed work to volunteers through the BOINC client, the same volunteer computing middleware that underpins projects such as SETI@home and Einstein@Home. The project's simulation engine modelled malaria transmission and intervention effects using individual-based stochastic simulation, generating outputs across a population of $5\times 10^4$ to $10^5$ simulated individuals per work unit and tracking variables including the entomological inoculation rate $EIR$ and the resulting force of infection over time. The project supplied a custom OpenGL screensaver, developed by Jasenko Zivanov, a University of Basel student who had previously designed the graphics for SETI@home; the visualization rendered an animated three-dimensional chart plotting the average infectiousness of the simulated human population by age group over time, layered against a stylised African landscape populated by animated mosquitoes, and included a "mosquito cam" viewing mode. The graphics application was only ever made available for Windows. See BOINC project screensavers for a broader survey of project screensaver graphics across BOINC history.

Legacy

Although the volunteer computing project itself ended in 2016, its scientific legacy continues through OpenMalaria, the open-source malaria simulation framework seeded by malariacontrol.net's codebase. OpenMalaria remains under active development by Swiss TPH's disease modelling group and collaborators, and continues to be used to evaluate the cost-effectiveness and likely public-health impact of malaria interventions and vaccination strategies in support of policy decisions by national malaria control programmes and international bodies.

See also

• BOINC projects
• SETI@home
• Einstein@Home
• World Community Grid
• BOINC project screensavers