Volunteer Computing
From ICVWiki
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Africa@home
Africa@home is an interdisciplinary project, the first phase of which allowed the Swiss Tropical Institute to run a malaria-modeling project thanks to the BOINC technology. The Africa@home multi-stakeholder partnership involves CERN, the University of Geneva, ICVolunteers, the World Health Organization, AIMS, several other African academic institutions, the Swiss Tropical Institute, and Informaticiens sans frontières, with the support of the Geneva International Academic Network.
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Asia@home
The aim of Asia@home is to promote the use of volunteer computing and volunteer thinking in Asia. Asia@home got its name from Africa@home, an interdisciplinary project which applied volunteer computing to projects in Africa. During its first phase, it allowed the Swiss Tropical Institute to run a malaria modelling project thanks to the BOINC technology. This was made possible through the multi-stakeholder partnership called Africa@home, which involves CERN, the University of Geneva, ICVolunteers, the World Health Organization, AIMS, several other African academic institutions, the Swiss Tropical Institute, and Informaticiens sans frontières (ISF), with the support of the Geneva International Academic Network.
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BOINC
It stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. Invented by David Anderson, BOINC is a software package which allows mobilizing computing and storage resources through the Internet. BOINC is client-server based. It facilitates complex scientific computing through distributed public computing resources. In that sense, it is a form of digital solidarity. BOINC is freely available and enables a range of different applications in an easy and fast fashion (Windows, Linux, Mac-OS and other operating systems compatible). The program functions like a traditional screen-saver. However, in addition to showing images, it also carries out useful computation in the background.
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What kinds of risks do I take when participating as a volunteer in Volunteer Computing?
There are several risks. Solutions have been found to all of them. First of all, a hacker could potentially replace an application with malware, with bad consequences for all the volunteers using the application. This can be prevented by digitally "signing" applications on a physically isolated computer. Second, application might be valid but buggy. An account-based sandbox is the answer here. Projects also need to be protected from malicious volunteers. For example, volunteers might upload bad data, falsifying results. This can be prevented by sending the same job the two volunteers and then cross-checking the results obtained. The replication can be skipped when a volunteer has gained a sufficiently good reputation. Some projects might involve sensitive data -- for example, gene sequences. Such data cannot be hidden from volunteers, even if files are encrypted. However, it may be possible to divide a data set into small pieces that are not sensitive in isolation.
