FAQ about Asia@home

From Asia at Home

1. What is Grid Computing?

Grid Computing is an emerging technology that provides seamless access to computing power and data storage capacity distributed over the globe. Grid computing (or the use of computational grids) is the application of several computers to a single problem at the same time – usually to a scientific or technical problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data. Grid computing depends on software to divide and apportion pieces of a program among several computers, sometimes up to many thousands. Grid computing can also be thought of as distributed[citation needed] and large-scale cluster computing, as well as a form of network-distributed parallel processing.

2. What is Volunteer Computing?

Volunteer Computing --also called peer-to-peer computing, global computing or community computing-- uses computers offered on a volunteer basis by the general public to do complex scientific computing. It is currently being used in particular in molecular biology, medicine, climate studies, high energy physics and environmental sciences.

3. What does BOINC stand for?

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. To learn more about BOINC, see http://boinc.berkeley.edu.

4. 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.

5. What is Bossa?

Bossa is an open-source software framework for distributed thinking (also called volunteer thinking) - the use of volunteers on the Internet to perform tasks that use human cognition, knowledge, or intelligence. Bossa minimizes the effort of creating and operating a distributed thinking project. It provides a project web site, hosted on your Linux server, where volunteers go to perform tasks and to interact with other volunteers. All you need to supply are PHP scripts to generate, show, and handle tasks. Bossa helps you deal with the variance of volunteer skill. It maintains estimates of the skill level of volunteers, and ensures that, for each task, there is a 'consensus' of compatible results among a sufficient set of volunteers. Typically you will want to train volunteers; this can be done using Bolt, a framework for web-based training that integrates with Bossa. To learn more about Bossa, see http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/BossaIntro.

6. What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is a style of computing in which dynamically scalable and often virtualised resources are provided as a service over the Internet. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure "in the cloud" that supports them.

7. What is Volunteer Thinking?

Distributed thinking, or volunteer thinking, is the use of volunteers on the Internet to perform tasks that use human cognition, knowledge, or intelligence. Through joint efforts, results can be compared and refined.

8. What is 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.

9. What is Middleware?

In the computer industry, middleware is a general term for any programming that serves to "glue together" or mediate between two separate and often already existing programs. A common application of middleware is to allow programs written for access to a particular database to access other databases.

FAQ assembled by V. Krebs, http://www.icvolunteers.org