BOINC Central: Difference between revisions

| name                   = BOINC Central

| logo                   = BOINC_central.png|frameless

| screenshot             =

| caption                =

| 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}}

| latest release date   =  

| operating system       = Cross-platform (via [[BOINC]] client)

| platform              = [[wikipedia:BOINC|BOINC]], [[Docker (software)|Docker]] (via [[#BUDA|BUDA]])

| genre                 = [[wikipedia:Volunteer computing|Volunteer computing]]

| license               = [[Open-source software|Open source]] ([[GNU Lesser General Public License|LGPL]])

[https://boinc.berkeley.edu/central/ '''''BOINC Central'''''] is based on [[Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing|BOINC]] – a system for '''''volunteer computing''''', allowing people around the world to donate computing power to science research.

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'''<ref>{{cite web |url=https://boinc.berkeley.edu/central/ |title=Welcome to BOINC Central |publisher=University of California, Berkeley |date=26 November 2021 |access-date=2026-05-18}}</ref> and is operated by the [[University of California, Berkeley]] BOINC project, under the direction of research scientist [[David P. Anderson]].

* '''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.<ref name=about/> It now also accepts any science application packaged using [[Docker (software)|Docker]] through the BUDA framework (see below).

* Any application packaged with [[Docker (software)|Docker]]

* [[AutoDock Vina|AutoDock]] from the Scripps Research Institute

[[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]].<ref>{{cite web |url=https://vina.scripps.edu/ |title=AutoDock Vina |publisher=The Scripps Research Institute |access-date=2026-05-18}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite journal |url=https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3041641/ |title=AutoDock Vina: improving the speed and accuracy of docking with a new scoring function, efficient optimization and multithreading |journal=Journal of Computational Chemistry |year=2010 |volume=31 |pages=455–461 |doi=10.1002/jcc.21334}}</ref>

BOINC (pronounced {{IPAc-en|b|ɔɪ|ŋ|k}}, 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 [[FLOPS|PetaFLOPS]] daily.<ref name=boinc-wikipedia/> 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.<ref name=boinc-wikipedia/>

[[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]].<ref>{{cite encyclopedia |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_P._Anderson |title=David P. Anderson |encyclopedia=Wikipedia |access-date=2026-05-18}}</ref>

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]].<ref>{{cite web |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_P._Anderson |title=David P. Anderson – Wikipedia |access-date=2026-05-18}}</ref> 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]].