ASIA@home

Volunteer computing is an established technology that enables ordinary citizens around the globe to contribute to important challenges in fundamental science and medicine, by providing idle time on their PCs and even partaking in data analysis via the Internet. For scientists, volunteer computing represents a free and essentially unlimited computing resource. Made popular already a decade ago by the screensaver project SETI@home, volunteer computing now counts over 50 projects running in a wide variety of scientific domains, including climate change, astrophysics, earthquake monitoring and epidemiology. Several million volunteers are contributing to such projects, and many use a common software platform called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing). However, so far almost all these projects have been launched by scientists in North America and Europe. Therefore, this seminar aims to increase awareness of volunteer computing in China.