Goals

BOINC is the preeminent platform for volunteer computing (VC). It is used by most VC projects, including SETI@home, Einstein@home, Climateprediction.net, IBM World Community Grid, and Rosetta@home.

Science United is a new way to particate in BOINC. With Science United, computer owners volunteer for science areas rather than for specific projects. Science United assigns computers to appropriate projects; these assignments may change over time.

We call this the 'coordinated model' for VC. It has the advantage that new projects can get computing power without having to do their own publicity and volunteer recruitment. The goal is to provide the power of VC to thousands of scientists, rather than a few dozen as was previously the case.

Learn more: Coordinated Volunteer Computing

The user interface of Science United is designed to appeal to a wider audience than the current BOINC user base, which is mostly male and tech-savvy. For example, Science United has no leader boards.

Learn more: Science United: UI/UX goals

Science United is also intended to serve as a unified 'brand' for VC, so that it can be marketed more effectively.

How Science United allocates resources

Science United maintains a set of BOINC projects to which it assigns volunteer computers. For now, all science projects vetted by BOINC are included in this set, and they have equal allocations. Eventually the selection of science projects, and the allocation of computing power among them, will be determined by a committee of scientists.

If you are a scientist considering using BOINC, please contact us. It may be possible for us to guarantee inclusion of your project, and to provide an estimate of the computing power it will receive.

The Project

Science United is operated at UC Berkeley under the direction of David P. Anderson, the founder of BOINC. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation under awards 1550601 and 1664190.

Software

The Science United software is distributed under the LGPL v3 license. It is hosted on Github.

Learn more: Science United: Implementation.

Help wanted

You can help Science United in the following ways:

• Planning and design: this is done through Github issues. Feel free to create and/or comment on issues.
• Programming: If you have the needed technical skills (PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Bootstrap) you can help develop and debug Science United. Go to Github and scan the issues.
• Translation: much of the Science United web site is translatable to non-English languages. These translations are done within the BOINC translation system