BOINC is the preeminent platform for volunteer computing (VC). It is used by most VC projects, including Einstein@home, Climateprediction.net, IBM World Community Grid, and Rosetta@home.
Science United is a new way to particate in BOINC. With Science United, you volunteer for science areas and locations rather than for specific projects. Science United assigns your 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Science United software is distributed under the LGPL v3 license. It is hosted on Github.
Learn more: Science United: Implementation.
You can help Science United in the following ways:
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