Malariacontrol.net: Difference between revisions
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{{Infobox software | {{Infobox software | ||
| name = | | name = malariacontrol.net | ||
| logo = | | logo = | ||
| logo caption = | | logo caption = | ||
| screenshot = Malaria.gif | | screenshot = Malaria.gif | ||
| caption = | | caption = malariacontrol.net Screensaver | ||
| description = Malariacontrol.net was a completed BOINC volunteer computing project, part of the Africa@home initiative, that simulated the transmission dynamics and health effects of malaria for the Swiss Tropical Institute and the University of Geneva between 2005 and 2016. | | description = Malariacontrol.net was a completed BOINC volunteer computing project, part of the Africa@home initiative, that simulated the transmission dynamics and health effects of malaria for the Swiss Tropical Institute and the University of Geneva between 2005 and 2016. | ||
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''' | {{Lowercase title}} | ||
'''malariacontrol.net''' was a [[volunteer computing|volunteer computing]] [[BOINC projects|BOINC project]] that simulated the transmission dynamics and health effects of [[wikipedia:Malaria|malaria]] in order to help researchers evaluate strategies for controlling the disease across Africa.<ref name="wiki-mcp">{{Cite web |title=Malaria Control Project |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaria_Control_Project |website=Wikipedia |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> Run by the [[wikipedia:Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute|Swiss Tropical Institute]] (now the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Swiss TPH) in Basel, in partnership with the [[wikipedia:University of Geneva|University of Geneva]], the project was the founding and only activity of the [[wikipedia:Africa@home|Africa@home]] initiative, which had in turn been conceived and developed with help from [[wikipedia:CERN|CERN]].<ref name="africa-home">{{Cite web |title=Africa@home |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa@home |website=Wikipedia |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> malariacontrol.net is generally credited as the first volunteer computing project to model the spread of a human disease.<ref name="natgeo2006">{{Cite news |last=Lovgren |first=Stefan |date=2006-08-08 |title=Malaria Battlers Enlist Power of Your PC |work=National Geographic News |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140902224121/http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060808-malaria.html |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> The project ran for roughly a decade before being retired on 21 June 2016.<ref name="status2016">{{Cite web |last=Maire |first=Nicolas |date=2016-06-21 |title=Status and plans as of June 2016 |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160722220548/http://www.malariacontrol.net/forum_thread.php?id=1472 |website=malariacontrol.net |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> | |||
== History == | == History == | ||
The malariacontrol.net domain name was first registered on 19 May 2005,<ref name="whois">{{Cite web |title= | The malariacontrol.net domain name was first registered on 19 May 2005,<ref name="whois">{{Cite web |title=malariacontrol.net domain information |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220111071411/https://www.whois.com/whois/malariacontrol.net |website=whois.com |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> 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.<ref name="whirlpool">{{Cite web |title=mc |url=https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/mc |website=Whirlpool Wiki |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> The project launched publicly on the [[wikipedia:BOINC|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), [[wikipedia:ICVolunteers|ICVolunteers]], and CERN.<ref name="africa-home" /> | ||
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.<ref name="whirlpool" /> 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.<ref name="wiki-mcp" /><ref name="natgeo2006" /> The project used [[wikipedia:Stochastic simulation|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 [[wikipedia:Insecticide-treated net|mosquito nets]], drug treatment, and candidate vaccines.<ref name="how-it-works">{{Cite web |title=How does | 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.<ref name="whirlpool" /> 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.<ref name="wiki-mcp" /><ref name="natgeo2006" /> The project used [[wikipedia:Stochastic simulation|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 [[wikipedia:Insecticide-treated net|mosquito nets]], drug treatment, and candidate vaccines.<ref name="how-it-works">{{Cite web |title=How does malariaControl.net work? |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170629144036/http://africa-at-home.web.cern.ch/africa-at-home/malariacontrolnet.html |website=Africa@home |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> | ||
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.<ref name="krebs2010">{{Cite journal |last=Krebs |first=Viola |date=2010-02-01 |title=Motivations of cyber-volunteers in applied volunteer computing environment: | 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.<ref name="krebs2010">{{Cite journal |last=Krebs |first=Viola |date=2010-02-01 |title=Motivations of cyber-volunteers in applied volunteer computing environment: malariacontrol.net as an example |journal=[[wikipedia:First Monday (journal)|First Monday]] |volume=15 |issue=2 |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170403093734/http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2783/2452/#author |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> | ||
Starting on 4 November 2010, with financial support from the [[wikipedia:Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation|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.<ref name="openmalaria-wiki">{{Cite web |last=Smith |first=Thomas A. |date=2017-04-20 |title=Open Malaria |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170710032517/https://github.com/swisstph/openmalaria/wiki |website=GitHub |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> | Starting on 4 November 2010, with financial support from the [[wikipedia:Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation|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.<ref name="openmalaria-wiki">{{Cite web |last=Smith |first=Thomas A. |date=2017-04-20 |title=Open Malaria |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170710032517/https://github.com/swisstph/openmalaria/wiki |website=GitHub |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> | ||
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== Termination == | == 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.<ref name="status2016" /> 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 [[wikipedia:High-performance computing|high-performance computing]] had made dedicated cluster resources available to the group that simply hadn't existed a decade before.<ref name="status2016" /> 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.<ref name="status2016" /> 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.<ref name="boincstats2016">{{Cite web |title= | On 21 June 2016, the project's science team announced that malariacontrol.net would not resume sending out work units and confirmed its termination.<ref name="status2016" /> 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 [[wikipedia:High-performance computing|high-performance computing]] had made dedicated cluster resources available to the group that simply hadn't existed a decade before.<ref name="status2016" /> 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.<ref name="status2016" /> 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.<ref name="boincstats2016">{{Cite web |title=malariacontrol quits |url=https://www.boincstats.com/forum/10/11036,1 |website=BOINCstats/BAM! |date=2016-08-01 |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> | ||
== Scientific output == | == Scientific output == | ||
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# {{Cite journal |last=Carneiro |first=Ilona |last2=Smith |first2=Lucy |last3=Ross |first3=Amanda |last4=Roca-Feltrer |first4=Arantxa |last5=Greenwood |first5=Brian |last6=Schellenberg |first6=Joanna Armstrong |last7=Smith |first7=Thomas |last8=Schellenberg |first8=David |year=2010 |title=[https://doi.org/10.2471/BLT.09.072397 Intermittent preventive treatment for malaria in infants: a decision-support tool for sub-Saharan Africa] |journal=Bulletin of the World Health Organization |doi=10.2471/BLT.09.072397}} | # {{Cite journal |last=Carneiro |first=Ilona |last2=Smith |first2=Lucy |last3=Ross |first3=Amanda |last4=Roca-Feltrer |first4=Arantxa |last5=Greenwood |first5=Brian |last6=Schellenberg |first6=Joanna Armstrong |last7=Smith |first7=Thomas |last8=Schellenberg |first8=David |year=2010 |title=[https://doi.org/10.2471/BLT.09.072397 Intermittent preventive treatment for malaria in infants: a decision-support tool for sub-Saharan Africa] |journal=Bulletin of the World Health Organization |doi=10.2471/BLT.09.072397}} | ||
# {{Cite journal |last=Ross |first=Amanda |last2=Smith |first2=Thomas |year=2010 |title=[https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2875-9-132 Interpreting malaria age-prevalence and incidence curves: a simulation study of the effects of different types of heterogeneity] |journal=Malaria Journal |doi=10.1186/1475-2875-9-132}} | # {{Cite journal |last=Ross |first=Amanda |last2=Smith |first2=Thomas |year=2010 |title=[https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2875-9-132 Interpreting malaria age-prevalence and incidence curves: a simulation study of the effects of different types of heterogeneity] |journal=Malaria Journal |doi=10.1186/1475-2875-9-132}} | ||
# {{Cite journal |last=Krebs |first=Viola |year=2010 |title=[https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i2.2783 Motivations of cybervolunteers in an applied distributed computing environment: | # {{Cite journal |last=Krebs |first=Viola |year=2010 |title=[https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i2.2783 Motivations of cybervolunteers in an applied distributed computing environment: malariaControl.net as an example] |journal=First Monday |doi=10.5210/fm.v15i2.2783}} | ||
# {{Cite journal |last=Gosoniu |first=L. |last2=Vounatsou |first2=P. |last3=Sogoba |first3=N. |last4=Maire |first4=N. |last5=Smith |first5=T. |year=2009 |title=[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csda.2009.02.022 Mapping malaria risk in West Africa using a Bayesian nonparametric non-stationary model] |journal=Computational Statistics & Data Analysis |doi=10.1016/j.csda.2009.02.022}} | # {{Cite journal |last=Gosoniu |first=L. |last2=Vounatsou |first2=P. |last3=Sogoba |first3=N. |last4=Maire |first4=N. |last5=Smith |first5=T. |year=2009 |title=[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csda.2009.02.022 Mapping malaria risk in West Africa using a Bayesian nonparametric non-stationary model] |journal=Computational Statistics & Data Analysis |doi=10.1016/j.csda.2009.02.022}} | ||
# {{Cite journal |last=Tediosi |first=Fabrizio |last2=Maire |first2=Nicolas |last3=Penny |first3=Melissa |last4=Studer |first4=Alain |last5=Smith |first5=Thomas A. |year=2009 |title=[https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2875-8-127 Simulation of the cost-effectiveness of malaria vaccines] |journal=Malaria Journal |doi=10.1186/1475-2875-8-127}} | # {{Cite journal |last=Tediosi |first=Fabrizio |last2=Maire |first2=Nicolas |last3=Penny |first3=Melissa |last4=Studer |first4=Alain |last5=Smith |first5=Thomas A. |year=2009 |title=[https://doi.org/10.1186/1475-2875-8-127 Simulation of the cost-effectiveness of malaria vaccines] |journal=Malaria Journal |doi=10.1186/1475-2875-8-127}} | ||
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== Technology == | == Technology == | ||
malariacontrol.net distributed work to volunteers through the [[BOINC|BOINC]] client, the same [[wikipedia:Volunteer computing|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 [[wikipedia:Stochastic simulation|stochastic simulation]], generating outputs across a population of <math>5\times10^{4}</math> to <math>10^{5}</math> simulated individuals per work unit and tracking variables including the [[wikipedia:Entomological inoculation rate|entomological inoculation rate]] <math>EIR</math> and the resulting force of infection over time.<ref name="how-it-works" /> 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.<ref name="screensaver">{{Cite web |title=What is the malariacontrol.net screen saver showing? |url=https://boinc.mundayweb.com/wiki/index.php?title=What_is_the_Malariacontrol.net_screen_saver_showing%3F |website=BOINC Wiki |access-date=2026-06-23}}</ref> The graphics application was only ever made available for Windows.<ref name="screensaver" /> See [[BOINC project screensavers]] for a broader survey of project screensaver graphics across BOINC history. | |||
== Legacy == | == Legacy == | ||