Machine Translated by Google

MASTER'S DEGREE COURSE IN
ADMINISTRATION AND PUBLIC POLICIESThe democratization of science
Analysis of the voluntary distributed
computing platform BOINC
Degree thesis by: Antonio Cerrato
Speaker: Prof. Giancarlo Vilella
Co-supervisor: Prof. Nicola Pasini
Academic Year 2021 /2022

Machine Translated by Google

Machine Translated by Google

Index
Abstract............................................................................................................................................................4
Methodological note............................................. .................................................... .....................................4
Chapter 1 The concept of citizen science, what is distributed computing, the functioning of the structure of
BOINC and scientific production............................................. .................................................... ...................6
1.1 Citizen science, definition and advantages............................................. .................................................... ..6
1.2 Distributed computing............................................. .................................................... ...............................7
1.3 How BOINC works............................................. .................................................... ...................10
1.4 BOINC's Terms of Use, Source Code, and Privacy Policy.............................................. ...13
1.5 Historical notes on the birth of BOINC............................................. .................................................... ......15
1.6 BOINC's projects............................................. .................................................... ..............................16
1.7 The scientific production of BOINC............................................. .................................................... ......171.7.1 Methodology for collecting scientific publications............................................. ...................17
1.7.2 Statistics of scientific production............................................. ...........................................18
Chapter 2 BOINC's virtual communities............................................. .................................................... ........22
2.1 I Team..................................................................................................................................................22
2.2 Virtual communities............................................. .................................................... ................................23
2.3.1 The challenge………………………………………. .................................................. .................................25
2.3.2 Il Pentathlon.................................................. .................................................. .................................27
2.3.3 The BOINC Formula................................... ................................................ ......................28
2.3.4 Competitions for scientific research and the conflict between users ........................................ ............28
2.4 Administrative subdivision, regionalism, localism and increase in computing power................................30
2.4.1 The Francophone case............................................. .................................................... .........................30
2.4.2 The Italian case............................................. .................................................... ............................31
2.5 The organization of virtual communities and the network: a brief analysis of the organization and the new
economy....................................................................................................................................................32
2.6 La gamification....................................................................................................................................35
2.6.1 The gamification of projects........................................... .................................................... ...........35
2.6.2 Gamification and signatures on virtual community forums...................................... ........................37

2.7 Analysis of the BOINC.Italy virtual community.......................................... ................................................392.7.1 Roles............................................. .................................................... ..............................................412.7.2 The activities of the volunteers............................................. .................................................... .................422.7.3 Ranks and gamification............................................. .................................................... .....................45
2.7.4 Gatherings............................................. .................................................... ........................................47

2.7.5 And the Challenge in BOINC.Italy……………………………………. .................................................. ..........49

1

Machine Translated by Google

2.7.6 The language of the community............................................. .................................................... ..........50
2.7.7 The costs of maintaining the BOINC.Italy portal ..................................... ................................51
Chapter 3 Survey with non-probability sample of the virtual community of BOINC.Italy: demography,
motivations and activities ............................................. .................................................... ...................................53
Chapter 4 The role of researchers and their relationship with volunteers. The function of firms in the network of
BOINC...........................................................................................................................................................62
4.1 BOINC projects in the Italian academic world, the types of projects and the causes of underutilisationof BOINC in Italy............................................. .................................................... ...................................62

4.1.1 SIMONE@home........................................................................................................................63
4.1.2 Tn-Grid.......................................................................................................................................64
4.1.3 The costs of Tn-Grid.......................................... .................................................... ................................65
4.1.4 The algorithm: generic or specific?...................................... .................................................... .....68
4.1.5 Why is BOINC little used in Italian universities?...................................... ...................69
4.2 Communication between researchers and volunteers ............................................. ................................................72
4.2.1 Communication management ............................................. .................................................... ...73
4.3 Gridcoin: is it ethically right to earn from volunteering? The point of view of researchers and volunteers...................................................................................................................................................................77
4.4 Firms as an actor in the BOINC network............................................. ..........................................79
4.4.1 IBM e World Community Grid...................................................................................................79
4.4.2 The scientific and social commitment of companies...................................... .......................................82
Chapter 5 The future prospects of distributed computing............................................. ........................................88
5.1 Centralized supercomputing and BOINC: do we still need distributed computing projects? The
EuroHPC case............................................. .................................................... .........................................88
5.2 Ibercivis and World Community Grid as models for a European or Italian multidisciplinary project...................................................................................................................................................................92
5.3 The role of public institutions in distributed computing according to BOINC.Italy volunteers...........95
5.4 Unused computing power: the example of upper secondary school in Italy.............97
Conclusions............................................. .................................................... .................................................... 99
Bibliography................................................... ................................................ ..........................................102
Cytography..... ................................................ ................................................ ........................................103
Text files, video and audio files, data and processing...................................... ........................................1052

Machine Translated by Google3

Machine Translated by Google

Abstract
The goal of this thesis is to analyze the relationship between computational volunteers
distributed of the BOINC platform and the researchers. BOINC is a platform of
distributed computing that falls within the complex of activities defined as citizen science. I havedetermined the scientific output of BOINC in 20 years of proving business
how BOINC is a great tool for scientific research. The analysis continues
with the description of the central role of the virtual communities born around theplatform. The complexity of these communities was not foreseen in 1999. The volunteers
they are not passive users but rather they are a very important player in the network of
BOINC and in particular help researchers in their activities. The elaborate also has
the aim of demonstrating how BOINC is a very economical alternative to the centresof data processing of the hi-tech giants. BOINC, for its multidisciplinarity and for theits way of aggregating communities is unique in the panorama of citizen projects
science. The structure of the Italian community "BOINC.Italy" will also be explored.
The analysis also takes into consideration researchers, those who ask for power
computing power offered by volunteers, and companies that can donate computing power or
propose distributed computing projects. Special emphasis will be placed oncommunication between researchers and volunteers as a fundamental pivot for a relationship ofmutual and loyal cooperation.

Methodological note
The thesis is mainly a qualitative analysis but with elements of quantitative analysis.
As regards the qualitative part of the research, interviews were carried out
speeches to the volunteers of BOINC.Italy and to the administrator of the Tn-Grid project, per
the free and open source software "Open Broadcaster Software"1 was used for the recordingof the interviews, while the interviews were conducted with the free teleconferencing service"Google Meet"2 ; has been used
1 https://obsproject.com site visited on 28/10/2022
2 https://meet.google.com site visited on 28/10/2022

4

Machine Translated by Google

non-participant observation to analyze user comments at some
virtual community forums and project sites. For the quantitative analysis it wasused secondary analysis to determine, for example, the number ofpublications or costs of distributed computing projects; to learn more about the report
between volunteers and researchers a sample survey was formulated, with sample
non-probabilistic, through a questionnaire that was administered to the community
virtual BOINC.Italy. The thesis was written using free and open software
source LibreOffice3 . The files are available through the Google Drive4 web service .

3

https://it.libreoffice.org site visited on 04/11/2022

4 https://www.google.com/intl/it_it/drive/ site visited on 04/11/20225

Machine Translated by Google

Chapter 1 The concept of citizen science, what is distributed computing, thefunctioning of the BOINC structure and scientific production

1.1 Citizen science, definition and advantages
Citizen science is the involvement of people, especially without details
scientific knowledge or analysis, in research projects. The participation of
persons concerns the collection, analysis and processing of data on a voluntary basis.
Research projects are often limited in terms of budget and resources
humanities, but citizen science, or the democratization of science, allows theresearchers to obtain much more data than could be collected with the normal humanand material resources made available to the researcher5 .
Researchers have different tasks and can delegate simpler tasks as wellrepetitive to the volunteers while they can deal with more complex tasks thatthey cannot be carried out by volunteers.

Simplifying, if a free volunteer analyzes 1 hour a week of theimages of galaxies to classify them means that the researcher, in 1 month, has
obtained 4 hours of analysis of galaxies without cost and being able to devote himself to other activities.

In the cost benefit analysis, this should be part of the opportunity cost of theresearcher6 .

There are also strong cost reductions with regard to hardware (eg.
acquisition and maintenance of servers for processing). Projects like
Einstein@Home and Rosetta@Home have a power approaching 2
PetaFLOPS per project, this power is provided by Amazon EC2, a virtual machine rental
service, at a cost of $43,520.00 in 20197 .

Savings in terms of

5 Pierangelo Crucitti, (2016), Citizen Science. Participatory science. Principles, examples and perspectives of a growing phenomenon
constant, p. 1
6 Massimo Florio, (2019), Investing in Science, p. 239
7 David P. Anderson, (2019), BOINC: A Platform for Volunteer Computing, p. 1

6

Machine Translated by Google

resources is significant given that the cost of CPU and GPU (purchase, maintenance,electricity) is translated almost entirely on volunteers.
Citizen science is not only about hard sciences, but also about soft sciences such asarcheology. An interesting example is that of the Archaeological Area of Poggio delMolino, near Populonia, where volunteers can help archaeologists
digging, cataloging artifacts and mapping the site, among the activities we find for example
the cleaning of individual mosaic tiles, which we can define as a repetitive activity ethat can be performed by anyone, which allows professionals to devote themselves tomore complex tasks or supervising more people, speeding up restoration8 .
The participation of citizens also allows them to get closer to the themes ofscientific research, decreasing the distance between researchers and citizens by providing
scientific insights as well as making people aware of the importance ofinvestment in scientific research.

1.2 Distributed computing

According to Wikipedia “ distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies i
distributed systems, i.e. systems that consist of many self-contained computersinteract/communicate with each other through a network in order to achieve a
common goal (software running in a distributed system is called a program
distributed, and distributed programming is the process of writing such software)”9 .

Then, unlike supercomputers, a complex problem is worked out and solved
not from a single very powerful electronic device but from a network of devices.
There are numerous distributed computing projects (BOINC, DreamLab della
Vodafone foundation, Folding@home etc.) who use smartphones, tablets but
especially personal computers of people who install the related software

8 https://earthwatch.org/expeditions/unearthing-ancient-history-in-tuscany site visited on 15/09/2022
9 https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcolo_distribuito#:~:text=Il% 20computing%20distributed%20is%20a,system%20distributed%20is%20said%20program site visited on 09/15/2022

7

Machine Translated by Google

computational project to solve complex problems (e.g. find a cure for adetermined type of cancer by simulating protein folding).
BOINC is definitely the most complex distributed computing project in terms ofnumber of scientific projects and sectors, 96 projects in 2022 in about 20 years of activity.
Folding is a distributed computing project that focuses on protein folding
and became the first supercomputer to break the exascalar barrier, plus it isbecame, for a time, the most powerful supercomputer in the globe by beating
any previous record and surpassing the top supercomputer per hour in the charts,
i.e. IBM Summit (148.6 petaFLOPS)10. Folding was recently surpassed by the Frontier
supercomputer (1,102 exaFLOPS)11, but it undoubtedly makes
reflect that the first supercomputer to achieve exascalare computing power
was not a supercomputer but the set of thousands of computers of a project by
distributed computing. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Folding@Home reached a peakcomputing power of 2.4 exaFLOPS12 or twice the power ofcalculation by Frontier (first position in the top 500 supercomputers by power ofcalculation)13 .

One of the limitations of distributed computing is the variability of computing power, users
they can suspend processing or uninstall BOINC. The computing power ofa voluntary computational design therefore is not constant and is not programmable as
per i supercomputer.

10 https://www.anandtech.com/show/15661/folding-at-home-reaches-exascale-1000000000000000000-operations-per-second-for-covid-19 site
visited 09/16/2022
11 https://www.hwupgrade.it/news/server-workstation/frontier-inaugura-l-era-exascale-e-il-supercomputer-piu-veloce-al-mondo-grazie-ai-chip
amd_107576.html site visited on 17/09/2022
12 https://www.hwupgrade.it/news/sistemi/folding-home- Potenza-superiore-ai-primi-500-supercomputer-al-mondo-messi-insieme- passed-the-2-4exaflops_88543.html site visited on 17/09/2022
13 https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2022/06/ 17/09/2022

8

Machine Translated by Google

The computing power is based on the unit of measurement of FLOPS (FLoating point
Operations Per Second ) or the number of operations that are performed in 1
second from CPU14 .
At each clock cycle a certain number of operations (Nop) are performed thisvalue must be multiplied by the clock frequency (fclock) to get the number
di FLOPS (FLOPS= Nop x fclock ).

fclock = 2GHz;

Is. Nop = 10;

FLOPS = Nop x fclock = 2GHz x 10 = 20 GigaFLOPSThis is true if the CPU has only 1 core, so let's add one more into the formulamultiplication, i.e. the number of cores (Ncore).
So if we have a processor with 4 cores we must add x4 to the formula15 .

es. CPU quadcore
Nop = 16;

fclock = 2GHz;

no. processors = 4

Nop x fclock x Ncore= 2GHz x 16 x 4 = 128 GigaFLOPS

The main concept of distributed computing projects is that many computers (evenunderperformers), united in a network, can equal or exceed thesupercomputer in fact the computing power also depends on the number of processors andnot only by the power of the single processor (number of operations and frequency ofclock).

14 https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS site visited on 16/09/2022 site visited on 16/09/2022
15 http://www.programmiamo.altervista.org/hwsw/hwsw11.html site visited on 09/16/2022

9

Machine Translated by Google

1.3 The operation of BOINC

The user downloads the software16 from the BOINC official site, after which he installs it andchoose a project to support (Figure 1) through the "BOINC Manager" or thecontrol panel (Figures 2 and 3).

16 https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php site visited on 09/17/202210

Machine Translated by Google

The user must subscribe to the individual BOINC projects by choosing a username,a password and email. Each email is associated with the CPID (Cross-project
identification) which is used to connect the BOINC Manager to an account manager. The
CPID is useful for statistics external to BOINC17, for example to compare thecredits between two teams, during a challenge, on sites external to that of BOINC.
Using two different emails means having two different CPIDs and therefore the user will have
two separate accounts. The user, if he used the same username, will appear as twotimes in the stats (the credits will stay the same because they are based on the power ofcalculation so they will not duplicate).
Account managers are sites, external to the official BOINC site, which help the user manage
and view the statistics of their account18,

moreover, many challenges between teams are based precisely on the scores recorded by some accounts

manager (e.g. “BOINC Account Manager (BAM!)” ). The user can then,
optionally, create an account on an account manager and connect via the“Tools” section of the BOINC control panel similarly as for a
project.

Moving on to how BOINC actually works, the user's PC requires sometask to the project server which in turn will send the requested tasks to the user's PC, inbased on the characteristics of the PC. After downloading the tasks, also called "work units"or "wu", the PC will start to process them and once processed it will send them to the server
project. After which the user's PC will request new processing by repeating the
ciclo19 .

The same work unit is sent to two different users who then process the same task.
This is to minimize processing errors. In case the results of the

17 https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Cross-project_identification site visited 09/20/2022
18 https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Account_managers site visited 09/20/2022
19 https:/ /boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/How_BOINC_works site visited 09/20/202211

Machine Translated by Google

same elaboration are different, the two elaborations are compared with a third one(processed by a third user).

The user receives a score, called credit, when the project server compares andvalidates the two elaborations coming from different PCs and users20 .

Double processing is also to prevent a user from spoofing results for
get an altered score to climb the leaderboards. Plus the double
processing is needed so that at least one result is actually returned to theserver. The wus have time limits, this way you are sure not tomiss a certain work package which will be returned to the server and sent to
a new user for processing (this leads to inefficiencies with respect to the calculation
run by supercomputers in fact not meeting deadlines means that the server
he will have to cancel some wu, perhaps already partly elaborated, and reassign them to anotheruser lengthening processing times and therefore scientific research).

The unit of measurement of the score is the credit which is 1/200 of the CPU time.
Initially, a 1 GigaFLOPS electronic device produced 200 credit units in one day21. The
production of the credits was subsequently changed, thevalue given by an elaboration is determined by the project administrators. The
credit has no monetary value but is used by researchers as a toolof gamification to increase user engagement in the processing of work
unit.

Another quantity is the RAC (Recent Average Credit) whichmeasures the average credit of all machines associated with a user in a week.

20 https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/How_BOINC_works site visited 09/20/2022
21 https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Computation_credit site visited 09/20/202212

Machine Translated by Google

The RAC, in case of failure to grant credit in 7 days, decreases by 50%22 .
It basically serves to see if a user is active.

1.4 BOINC Terms of Use, Source Code and Privacy Policy The software is free to use
and is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License23. The sourcecode of BOINC is open source and available on GitHub24

As far as the individual applications of the projects are concerned, this depends on the project a
project, for example Einstein@Home is in turn free software distributed under the GNU Lesser
General Public License25 and the source code is open source26 as is the application forsearching for binary pulsars27 .

BOINC.Italy compiled a list of open source projects. 43 out of 96 projects have made theirsource code available28, in some cases the projects have not made it open
source the source code because, in part, it is based on paid licenses.

As far as user data is concerned, the individual user can choose a username that
may not coincide with his name and surname thus making it anonymous. The email
used for registration to individual projects is not shown in any site or forum, it is notshown to the organizers but can be used to receive newsletters (the option
can be deactivated). If you participate in a project, the individual project registers
information such as processor type, graphics card, ram etc.. The
hardware information can be shown to other users with consent
of the single user (Figure 4). In the absence of the individual user's consent to a

22 https://boinc.berkeley.edu/boinc_papers/credit/text.php site visited 09/20/2022
23 University of California, (2022), License Agreement 24
https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/ site visited on 21/09/2022 25
https://einsteinathome.org/it-it/application-source-code-and-license site visited on 21/09/2022
26 https://wiki.ligo.org/Computing /LALSuite site visited on 21/09/2022
27 https://einsteinathome.org/it-it/application-source-code-and-license site visited on 21/09/2022
28 https://www.boincitaly.org /projects/sources-projects.html site visited on 06/10/202213

Machine Translated by Google

project, the credits of that project will not be recorded by the account manager and will notthey will appear on third-party statistics sites29 .

In no case will the location of the electronic device be shown
the user's IP address30 .
Each individual project has its own privacy policy (e.g. Einstein@Home31).

29 https://boinc.berkeley.edu/info.php site visited on 09/21/2022
30 https://boinc.berkeley.edu/info.php site visited on 09/21/2022
31 https://einsteinathome .org/it-it/privacy site visited on 09/21/2022

14

Machine Translated by Google

1.5 Historical notes on the birth of BOINC
BOINC was developed between 2001 and 2002 to then actually bereleased in February 2002. BOINC is however the second stage of a firstproject that had discovered potential in voluntary computation.
In 1995 David Pope Anderson (the originator of BOINC) was contacted by David Gedye,
his former teaching assistant for teaching operating systems, to create avoluntary computing project for SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) ethen to analyze SETI radio telescope data to search for radio signals
synthetics. SETI@home was officially launched in May 1999. The program
was a success, in the first year the peak of 1000 years of calculation was reached several times

per day. The main problem with SETI@home is that it included both the of part
infrastructure (server-client communication) and scientific analysis. So
every time the scientific part changed, a new one had to be released
updating of the entire program forcing continuous installations byof user-volunteers. From this experience, Anderson decided to split
the infrastructure from the scientific part of the project and to combine everything with the more
complex concept of big science32 .

While working at BOINC, Anderson applied to the National Science Foundation(NSF, the independent federal research support agency33)
to subsidize the development of the distributed computing platform. So he got
the position of Research Scientist at the University of California, Berkeley34. TO
Due to some legal wrangling, Anderson decided that the source code of BOINC
it was supposed to belong to the University of California and it was supposed to be open source.

Being a professor in that university and having regard to his decision to make theopen source distributed computing platform decided to call the platform with thename of “BOINC” which is none other than the acronym of “Berkeley Open Infrastructure

32 https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php#origins site visited 09/22/2022
33 https://www.nsf.gov/about/ site visited 09/22/2022
34 https:// continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php#funding site visited on 09/22/202215

Machine Translated by Google

for Network Computing”, he was also looking for an onomatopoeic word compared to the classics
names from Greek mythology given to academic software projects35 .
SETI@home was included in BOINC and new scientific projects began to be born (Predictor@home
to predict protein structures36 , Climateprediction.net for the development of climatologicalmodels37 etc.)

1.6 BOINC's projects
In the more than 20 years since the platform, a number of projects have opened and closed.
We can divide projects into monothematic and multidisciplinary. The projects
monothematic focused on solving a single problem while inside themultidisciplinary projects we find some sub-projects also from different areas
scientific.
An example of a monothematic project is Einstein@Home, whose research area isthat of physics. It is a project conceived by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e
has as its objective “the search for weak astrophysical signals from stars ofrotating neutrons (often called pulsars) using data from the LIGO gravitational wave detector, theArecibo radio telescope and the Fermi gamma-ray satellite”38 .
Instead a multidisciplinary project is made up of several sub-projects. For example
World Community Grid has many different projects within it, such as"FightAIDS@Home" which had as its objective the analysis of the reaction of the compounds
chemicals with the HIV virus or “The Clean Energy Project” it was targetingthat of "finding new materials useful for new generation organic solar cells"39. Multidisciplinary
projects allow users to receive incontinuation of processing but also to choose which sub-projects to process ewhich ones not. Multidisciplinary projects, therefore, attract more users by allowing one
certain stability of computing power to researchers.
35 https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php#origins site visited on 22/09/2022
36 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictor@home site visited on 22/09/2022
37 https ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climateprediction.net site visited on 09/22/2022
38 https://einsteinathome.org/it-it/about site visited on 09/05/2022
39 https://it .wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Community_Grid site visited on 05/09/2022

16

Machine Translated by Google

1.7 The scientific production of BOINC

1.7.1 Methodology for collecting scientific publications
There is no complete and official list of scientific publications obtained
thanks to the BOINC platform. There is an official list but it is incomplete, in fact the list contains
420 publications40 while I registered 994 publications (more thandouble the list of official publications).
Projects are not required to draw up a list of publications, but independently
they release news about publications or have dedicated sections on project websites. For
example Einstein@Home has a very up-to-date section of the site dedicated to scientificpublications obtained with the help of volunteers41 .
The virtual communities, which have arisen around the platform, have tried to draw up somelists of scientific publications. The German virtual community Rechenkraft.net has
identified 187 scientific publications, or about half of the official numberof publications.
The Italian virtual community BOINC.Italy has identified a high number ofscientific publications, documents from conferences, workshops and reports
of projects. The BOINC.Italy list was obtained by checking the sites and forums ofindividual projects and by searching for the name of the projects on Google Scholar. From this list

already existing, I developed a spreadsheet file containing the publications
obtained thanks to BOINC volunteers. I then deleted from the list of
BOINC.Italy all those documents that have not had a peer evaluation
reviews (for example the power points of workshops or scientific conferences). I havereclassified the projects into 7 scientific areas: astronomy and physics; chemistry and energy
renewable; biology and medicine; climatology, earth study and ecology;
mathematics; cognitive and social sciences and computer science. With each publication I have

40 https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Publications_by_BOINC_projects site checked 05/10/2022
41 https://einsteinathome.org/it-it/science/publications site checked 05/10/202217

Machine Translated by Google

associated with the number of citations and the date when the citations were checked
quotations, i.e. between 11 July and 4 October.
I have updated, as far as possible, the number of publications above all to 2021
for projects still open through Google Scholar. Searching for publications isvery difficult because often researchers do not include in the keywords
articles words like “BOINC” or “volunteer computing”. The sections of the official sitesof the projects, dedicated to scientific publications, are not very up-to-date or
totally non-existent.

1.7.2 Statistics of scientific production
In about 20 years BOINC has produced at least 994 scientific publications42
we can define this number as the minimum number of publications
science actually obtained from distributed computing. Most likely
this number is higher but no further items could be traced.

42 The BOINC official list of scientific publications has been updated after the publication of this thesis (December 19,2022) also thanks to the documents elaborated with this thesis. Comparing the official list and the publications
list of this thesis, after two rounds of checks, one carried out by Alex Piskun and a second carried out by me, theofficial publications are 915 (as regards publications up to 2022). As of 08/07/2023 there are 921 publicationsin the official list. Below is the final file of the two rounds of checks: https://docs.google.com/
spreadsheets/d/1iAlZjKrExWMGMVhm78yWsgQ6d4PTlusXoi4K_kFKze0/edit?
usp=drive_link
18,

Machine Translated by Google

Table 1: Number of scientific publications by sector, Antonio Cerrato, 2022, source: elaborations by Cerrato withpartial extraction of information from the BOINC.Italy forum
Number of publications by scientific area

200

Astronomy and Physics

36

Chemistry and renewable energies
Biology and Medicine

486

Climatology, study of the earth and ecology

135

Mathematics

47

Cognitive and social sciences

13

Informatica

77

The scientific area with the most scientific publications (Table 1) is the medical sector eof biology with 486 articles, then we have the area of astronomy and physics with 200
publications. The sector with the fewest scientific publications is that of the sciences
cognitive and social. From here we can understand that most publications
it comes above all from the hard sciences and purely quantitative research.

Table 2: Average citations of scientific articles divided by sector, Antonio Cerrato, 2022, source: Cerrato
elaborations with partial extraction of information from the BOINC.Italy forum
Average number of citations by scientific area

Astronomy and Physics

51

Chemistry and renewable energies

94

Biology and Medicine

168

Climatology, study of the earth and ecology

105

Mathematics

10

Cognitive and social sciences

21

Informatica

16

19

Machine Translated by Google

I calculated the average number of citations by scientific area (Table 2), thesector with the highest average citations per publication is medical andbiology with an average of 168 citations per publication. The lowest averages
belong to the following areas: mathematics, cognitive and social sciences e
informatica.
These averages are in line with worldwide data by research area43 (Figure 5).

The projects with the most scientific publications are: Rosetta@Home with 223
scientific publications in 16 years of activity, ClimatePrediction.Net with 103
scientific publications in 18 years of activity and World Community Grid with 80
scientific publications in 17 years of activity.
The averages of the number of citations are as follows: 284 (World Community Grid),
237 (Rosetta@Home) and 129 (ClimatePrediction.Net).
43 Massimo Florio, (2019), Investing in Science, pp. 94-95

20

Machine Translated by Google

The most cited article is “AutoDock4 and AutoDockTools4: Automated docking withselective receptor flexibility” of the seventh project “FightAIDS@Home” of World
Community Grid with 15,848 citations.
Most likely without BOINC these publications would hardly be
could exist, in fact the researchers did not have to ask for any permission foraccess supercomputers and have therefore not submitted any requests toconsortia and/or commissions to obtain computing power that was provided, however,by volunteers.
The file containing the scientific publications can be downloaded at the following link44:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/124JZfQMU1CEbJxceP
5c2sq8S6kx3TftZGll91oSxqk/edit?usp=sharing

44 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/124JZfQMU1CEbJxceP-5c2sq8S6kx3TftZGll91oSxqk/edit?usp=sharing

21

Machine Translated by Google

Chapter 2 The virtual communities of BOINC
The actors that revolve around the world of BOINC are a fundamental part of thesuccess of distributed computing. The increasing complexity of organizations,that have arisen around BOINC, has determined the growth not only of
total computing power but also the level of socialization and growthcultural and scientific volunteers. Furthermore, distributed computing was fundamental

for the creation of the concept of "volunteering 2.0", that is an evolution ofconcept of volunteering declined in the improvement of support activities andscientific research. Certainly virtual communities (and teams) are an important one
part of the BOINC network that has not only embraced distributed computing but has it
incorporated in various ways.
Interviews were conducted with community administrators
BOINC.Italy.

N.b:*Full interviews are available via the section “Text files, video files ed
audio, data and processing" at the end of the report or through the link in the following note45

2.1 I Team
Each user can create or join a single team for each project. Each team has afounder and in case of inactivity by the founder the role can be transferred toanother user of the same team.
There are also statistics for teams or total credits (the sum of creditsof each user in the team) and the RAC which is calculated based on the average of the users.

By default, each project has 12 team types: company (for entrepreneurs andemployees), primary school, secondary school, junior college, university or
department, public body, NGO, national, local/regional, type of computer (e.gexample a team dedicated to enthusiasts and owners of electronic devices
45 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QQuGK7dIe8aEI9Dg9uBIPz3aWqGcsvru?usp=sharing
22

Machine Translated by Google

Mac), charity/political/religious and none (residual category or for teams
international).
The predominant category, or certainly the most active, is the national and international one
based on the participation in the challenges between teams46 .
A state can be associated with each team (even if not national).
The country category should cover the territory of the country in the nameof the team, but the user does not have any special requirements to access theteam, so essentially anyone can join any national team in
based on one's own sense of belonging to this or that nation. There may beteams that, in their description, call themselves a national team (or that speak
mainly the language of the State reported) but which fall into the "none" category47 or in any
case there may be more than one national team belonging to the samenation, for example if we select the State among the Rosetta@Home project teams“Germany” we will find several teams including SETI.Germany, Rosetta@Germany andRechenkraft.net (the latter is also present in the legal form of association no
profit in the Federal Republic of Germany). The same description as
Rechenkraft.net invites users “from all over the world” to join the team anyway
having a section of their site entirely in English as well as pointing out that many of them know
English48. As well as the calculation of BOINC is distributed anddecentralized, there is no single national team that has some sort ofrepresentativeness of a nation but more teams of the category can coexist"national" and of the State itself but which they have decided for interests, projects or objectives
to create different teams.

2.2 Virtual communities
In addition to team building based on BOINC projects some teams have gods
external sites, compared to BOINC, where they manage their goals and interests in a manner

46 https://www.boincstats.com/stats/challenge/team/overview site visited on 09/28/2022
47 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/team_display.php?teamid=26 site visited on 28 /09/2022
48 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/team_display.php?teamid=31 site visited on 28/09/202223

Machine Translated by Google

independent from the official forums of the various projects. For example Rechenkraft.net has one
own wiki distinct from the official BOINC49 one, it has its own site50 and a forum51 .
The forum is certainly one of the most important areas of a virtual community where
various discussions take place according to the topic of the topic. Always taking for example
Rechenkraft.net, the forum is divided into several sections which in turn are divided into
more specific subsections. The first section is dedicated to the rules of the forum (it isany unlawful activity such as copyright infringement is prohibited; it is not prohibited
political activity but must not lead to racist, homophobic orsexist52), 3 sections are dedicated to BOINC projects according to the subject
science (medicine, physics and mathematics), a section is dedicated to other projects(this section is very varied including: animation, finance, chess etc.), others
two sections are dedicated to the two distributed computing projects created on BOINC
right from Rechenkraft.net (yoyo@home and RNA World), then there's a whole section
dedicated to "citizen science", one of the last sections has a generic content e
encompasses several subsections not always related to distributed computing but moreto the sphere of socialization with informal discussions (“small talk”, science,
hardware, video games, etc.). The last 3 sections are dedicated to: the team (preparationof challenges, podcasts), to the public part of the association, while the last section is dedicatedto the management of the site, the wiki and the forum through feedback53 .

The forums ofvarious communities have more or less the same structure: a part dedicated toregulation and functioning of BOINC, one dedicated to the various projects and one tohobbies or in any case to topics of various kinds not always related to distributed computing(SETI.USA54, L'Alliance Francophone55, BOINC.Italy56 are some of themexample).

49 https://www.rechenkraft.net/wiki/Willkommen_beim_Verein_Rechenkraft.net_e.V. site visited on 28/09/2022
50 https://www.rechenkraft.net site visited on 28/09/2022
51 https://www.rechenkraft.net/forum/ site visited on 28/09/2022
52 https: //www.rechenkraft.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=6469 29/09/2022
53 https://www.rechenkraft.net/forum/ site visited on 28/09/2022
54 https:// www.setiusa.us/forum.php site visited on 28/09/2022
55 https://www.boinc-af.org site visited on 28/09/2022
56 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum. html site visited on 09/28/202224

Machine Translated by Google

Anderson underlines how effectively teams, through their virtual communities,
have played an important role above all for the improvement and for the increase of thecomputing power of BOINC57 .

2.3 The challenges, the Pentathlon and the BOINC Formula2.3.1 The challenge
Challenges are certainly one of the most competitive tools, between teams
important.
Essentially the team that gets the most credits on a given project, in agiven time window, gets the first position and wins the challenge.
For the challenges, mainly external sites such as BoincStats or in are usedin some cases there is the possibility of creating challenges within the project sites as in thecase of World Community Grid58 .
The team creates the challenge by determining the project, the start date (based on the timeUTC) and the end date of the challenge59. The team that created the challenge candecide if the other teams can register for the competition before the datestart of the challenge or if they can also register during the race.
Individual projects therefore get a real boost, for a short period of time
time, by the participating teams. Plus challenges are a great way tointroduce new projects to users. The organization of the challenges allows
also to decrease the repetitiveness of the users' routines or in any case to limit thepassive activities of users, in fact there are strategies, refined over time, forface competitions.
One of these is the so-called "bunker". The wu generator server (wu diminutive ofwork unit = processing), of each project, generates a certain number of wu per day
therefore there is a limited number of elaborations to be sent to users. This is a

57 https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php#volunteer site visited on 09/28/2022
58 https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/help/topic.s?shortName=tmch site visited on 09/29 /2022
59 https://www.boincstats.com/stats/challenge/team/overview site visited on 09/29/202225

Machine Translated by Google

problem especially in test projects or in any case generate few wu, in fact theusers will tend to hoard the few wu available to gain an advantage
in challenges. Users, within each virtual community, will download intodays before the challenge a certain number of wu to take advantage of the first ones
hours / days of the race. Once a large amount of processing has been downloaded,
the user, through the BOINC control panel on his pc, will decide todisconnect the software from the internet (this will prevent the work units from being shipped
before the start of the challenge) and then have your BOINC manager reconnect
once the challenge has started. In this way the single user (for micromanagement)
it will "drop" its "bunker" (massive set of elaborate wu) in the first few hoursof the race; an organized team can therefore easily place itself in the top positions
at the start of the challenge. But BOINC, by default, sets a certain number of wu da
send to users, this limit can be brought, via BOINC manager, up to
20 days of work (i.e. calculation).

The allocation of wu to users' electronic devices depends on the power ofcalculation (number of cpu) of the single device.
Users have come up with a way to circumvent the wu assignment system.
In fact, it will be enough to modify one of the files, of the installed software, to make the server believeof the project of having a much more powerful pc in order to obtain more work units for the
bunker and then for the challenge60 .
One of the administrators of BOINC.Italy has also created a guide for creating multiple clientsand increasing the number of work units available to the user61 .
For the creation of the bunkers, the expiry date of the singles must be taken into accountwork unit. It is possible to create a bunker with hundreds of elaborations but what
they will be invalidated on the day of the challenge, because in the meantime they will all be expired
due to expiration dates.

60 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum/statistiche-sfide-e-traguardi/102820-come-organizzarsi-per-i-challenges.html site visited on 29/09/2022
61 https://www.boincitaly .org/supporto/multisessioni-boinc.html site visited on 09/29/2022

26

Machine Translated by Google

Users of a team can be divided into groups, for example who makes the bunker and who
no, who participates from the beginning and who enters the race in the challenge; strategic approaches

they are therefore part of the organization of a challenge (the topic “World Gene Expansion
Challenge 2021” is a good example62).

2.3.2 He Pentathlon
Another type of competition, created by the SETI.Germany virtual community, is thePentathlon now in its thirteenth edition in 2022 and organized annuallyfrom the German team. Just as the Pentathlon has 5 disciplines, the Pentathlon also has 5 disciplines

BOINC version has 5 disciplines: obstacle course, sprint, city run, cross country andjavelin throw. Each discipline corresponds to a different BOINC project.
Each discipline has its own rules and duration. For example the obstacle course
it lasts for the duration of this particular challenge (14 days) and is randomly
awarded a bonus score to credits processed on 3 different days to simulate thejumping over obstacles (score boosts are 100%, 150% and 200%). In
based on the ranking, each team gets points for each discipline63 .
A project is chosen by the organizers, for a single discipline, a few days
before the start of the single race, this involves considerable complexity and capacityof adaptation by the teams. Since there are therefore different rules and projects, the teams
they must develop strategies and possibly divide into groups in order to cover the different
disciplines and therefore the different projects64 .
Statistics are then generated from day to day until the end of thecompetition and to reward, symbolically, the first 3 teams at the end ofPentathlon65 .

We can define the Pentathlon as a more articulated version of a challenge. Self
in a classic challenge, the computing power of the team counts mainly, in thePentathlon this is not enough; in fact, the different teams must and must organize themselves
62 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum/statistiche-sfide-e-traguardi/115182-world-gene-expansion-challenge-2021.html?start=063 https://www.seti-germany.de /boinc_pentathlon/15_en_Rules.html site visited on 29/09/2022
64 https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/statistiken/pentathlon.php site visited on 29/09/2022
65 https://www.seti -germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/statistiken/pentathlon.php site visited on 09/29/202227

Machine Translated by Google

adopt strategies based on the characteristics of the project (processing timeof work units, processing based on cpu or even gpu, expiration of wu) and allecharacteristics of the disciplines.
The Pentathlon is yet another event to increase team engagement, and by the wayof its complexity, this engagement falls, cascading, on the individual users of the various
team.

2.3.3 The BOINC Formula
Always to keep the interest and participation in BOINC active, it was
created in 2007 another type of race between teams or the Formula BOINC. There
competition was created by user Otax of the L'Alliance Francophone team.
The competition lasts from January 1st to December 31st, thus covering the wholecalendar year. There are two disciplines: marathon and sprint. The marathon lasts
annual and all projects fall within the discipline (scores are therefore calculated inbased on the performance of the teams in the single project), the sprints have a duration of 3days and their functioning is similar to that of the challenges. Similarly to
Formula, we have 3 categories: “League 1”, “League 2”, and “League 3”. The teams more
performing will find themselves in the first category, those less performingin the last. At the end of the year the top 3 teams from league 2 and league 3
will be promoted in category, while the 3 worst teams will be relegated in category (similarly
as happens for football series)66 .

2.3.4 Competitions for Scientific Research and User Conflict There are no
real winners in these competitions, nothing material is won
in fact there are no gold medals or cash prizes, the only prize is progressscientific.
Challenge, pentathlon and Formula BOINC had not been considered at all
initially by the creator of BOINC, they are inventions of the users and teams who are
66 https://formula-boinc.org/index_v2.py?year=2022&lang=it&team=&thx= site visited on 09/29/2022

28

Machine Translated by Google

they are formed and aggregated over time. The credit system has therefore been used by theusers and amplified by the different types of challenges. Competitions are great
example of technology-in-practice, or a different or alternative use of the technological structure thatis available67 .
Obviously these challenges are still competitions, in fact there may be gods
conflicts before or during a challenge. For example, during the “World Gene Expansion Challenge
2021” challenge (beginning March 8th, ending March 15th 202168), on the project
Italian Tn-Grid, some users have shown some perplexity: the user
“Magiceye04” (team: Planet 3DNow!) is concerned about the very limited numberof the elaborations comparing them to the number of doses of the vaccine against the covid "(are)very rare”; user “Aurum” (team: Planet 3DNow!) seems very against ai“bunkers” because they limit the participation of users (and therefore of teams) in thecompetition; the user “Michael HW Weber” (team: Rechenkraft.net) points out that, during thechallenge, they were left without processing and that they are “still doing nothing”69 .
Choosing certain projects for challenges can therefore lead to conflicts
between users and teams.

An initiative very similar to the BOINC Formula including marathons and sprints70 has recently
appeared. Some users, not satisfied with some decisions of the Formula BOINC staff, would havedecided to create a parallel competition71 . As
reported by a user, some teams are telling other teams to unsubscribefrom the BOINC72 Formula .

67 Hatch, Cunliffe, (2013), Organization Theory, p. 180 68
https://www.boincstats.com/stats/challenge/team/chat/1089 site visited on 01/10/2022
69 http://gene.disi.unitn.it/test/forum_thread.php?id= 307
70 https://www.boincgames.com site visited on 17/10/2022
71 https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/boinc-games-live-for-alpha-testing.2597113/ site visited on 17 /10/2022 72 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum/statistiche-sfide-e-traguardi/115251-boincgames-cos-è.html site visited on 17/10/202229

Machine Translated by Google

2.4 Administrative subdivision, regionalism, localism and increase in computing
power
As was analyzed in paragraph 2.1, users belonging to the same country
they can join a single team but have a wide choice. Some teams, fordecrease the fragmentation of national groups, have engulfed within thetheir community own the concept of team divisions, that is, they have adopted thecreation of internal groups and an internal ranking. This is mainly for notdisperse the computing power during the challenges and to be attractive to the eyesof newbies who want to join a team.

2.4.1 The Francophone case

Concentration towards a team mainly depends on the characteristics
sociocultural aspects of a team, for example The Francophone Alliance is not the team ofFrench but francophones and this allows the team to go beyond territorial borders eadministrative French to attract users of different nationalities but that for reasonshistorical, social or political mainly speak the French language. The vision andadvantages are well explained by the same team on their site (“Pourquoi L'AllianceFrancophone ?”): the grouping of francophones makes it possible to have a mass
greater results, therefore greater computing power allows you to scale
easily world rankings to the whole team; The Alliance is one of the most visited sites
this means that there is a high circulation of information and more information means
better coordination and the ability to teach optimization (e.gfor challenges) to new members; therefore more information means recruiting newmembers and therefore increasing computing power73 .
How did the admins of the Alliance absorb smaller French-speaking teams?
On the site of the L'Alliance Francophone team we can see the subdivision madeby team admins. Among the main mini-teams we find: a group of

73 https://www.boinc-af.org/faq-alliance-francophone/pourquoi-lalliance-francophone.html site visited on 01/10/202230

Machine Translated by Google

Quebec74, a group of members of the French-speaking maritime community75, a groupdedicated to the Belgians (Wallonians, Flemings and even German speakers of the are allowed
Belgium)76 and so on77 in a sort of new French empire but of distributed computing.
An important aspect of the division into mini-teams is certainly that ofcredits. The Alliance, always internally, has precisely created internal statistics
between mini-teams78. The goal is to incorporate the external teams but without depriving them of thesense of competitiveness, plus internal competitiveness (on computing power)
definitely benefits the Alliance (in fact otherwise these teams
would be outside the international statistics of the Alliance). To enter oneof these mini-teams the individual user must add a tag within his own
nickname (for example if a user wants to join the Belgian group:“nickname”ÿ “[AF>Belgique] nickname”)79. The division into mini-teams does not haveeffects on external statistics sites, where only the wording “L'AllianceFrancophone” and not that of the mini teams.
Each group also has sections of the forum dedicated to its own mini-team (eg.
forum dei Belgi80)

2.4.2 The Italian case
Similar to the French-speaking team, BOINC.Italy has also adopted asimilar approach81 .
To avoid the fragmentation of the Italian teams, internal groups have been created a
BOINC.Italy. The main groups are based on the Italian division into regions,in fact we have the group of Emilia Romagna, Lombardia, Veneto, della
Campania etc. then there are more local groups such as citizen teams including the group of
Brescia, Belluno and Naples. Within the Italian team there are also some
74 https://www.boinc-af.org/liste-equipes/af-quebec.html site visited on 01/10/2022
75 https://www.boinc-af.org/af-amis-de-la -mer.html site visited on 01/10/2022
76 https://www.boinc-af.org/af-belgique.html site visited on 01/10/2022
77 https://www.boinc-af.org /liste-equipes.html site visited on 01/10/2022
78 https://statseb.boinc-af.org/classement_mt_v2.py?projet=0&niveau=1&sort=total site visited on 01/10/2022
79 https:/ /www.boinc-af.org/faq-alliance-francophone/comment-rejoindre-une-miniteam.html site visited on 01/10/2022
80 https://forum.boinc-af.org/index.php/topic ,2140.0.html site visited on 01/10/2022
81 https://www.boincitaly.org/community/gruppi-interni.html site visited on 01/10/202231

Machine Translated by Google

universities whose members are students or former students, among the various universities we findthe Polytechnic of Turin, the University of Rome, the University of Pavia, the University ofEastern Piedmont and the Milan Polytechnic. The only group actually not belonging to the Italian territoryis the group of Canton Ticino82 .
BOINC.Italy's approach is more marked by the grouping of Italian citizens
that of Italian-speakers, for example there are no internal groups of Italian-speaking Croatians, Greeks
or Albanians.
BOINC.Italy also has its own ranking among internal groups83 and has sections of the forum dedicated tointernal groups84 .

2.5 The organization of virtual communities and the network: a brief analysis of the organizationand the new economy We can define the actors
and levels of organization of BOINC based on the studies ofde Vita, Mercury and Testa. We classify users as individual individual units, thevirtual communities/teams as company level and project and challenge sites
as a meeting place between different communities, businesses and universities and therefore as a meeting
place for the network85. It is difficult to identify real groups
within individual communities; groups can be defined for example thosemembers who come together with face-to-face meetings and then cross over, such asgroup, all those characterizing phases (orientation, redefinition, coordination,
implementation, conclusion)

86.

Another example, much more frequent in virtual communities, can be the institutionof a group for the challenges.
A user informs the others, with a thread on the forum of the virtual community, of one
challenge. Users begin to see that he spontaneously participates in the challenge;
through the comments you can easily identify the members with the most experience. There is not
82 https://www.boincitaly.org/statistiche.html?show=listcommunity site visited on 01/10/2022
83 https://www.boincitaly.org/statistiche.html?show=listcommunity site visited on 01/10 /2022
84 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum/spazio-gruppi-e-community.html site visited on 01/10/2022
85 de Vita, Mercurio, Testa, (2007), pp.
5-7 86 de Vita, Mercurio, Testa, (2007), pp. 104-107

32

Machine Translated by Google

a specific assignment of roles. There is an assignment if a member of thecommunity organizes the challenge or if it has created internal or external statistics for thechallenge (orientation stage).
In the next phase, any problems emerge: newbies ask how to create ita bunker or it emerges that there is low participation so you try toincrease engagement to the challenge by involving and informing users ofoutside the specific thread/topic, for example with an ad hoc graphic on the homepage eannouncing the team's participation in the challenge on social media or in the live chat of thecommunity forum (redefinition stage).
The community is about to enter the real challenge phase, therefore other users
have joined the challenge or are considering strategies for thepentathlon. It defines who has prepared the bunker and who has not and who will enter once
challenge started (coordination stage).
The challenge begins, in the first hours the bunkers are released, any problems are resolved
stats issues if the team organized the challenge. Any conflicts
have a low priority compared to climbing the ladder (stadiumof the implementation).
In the last phase the members prepare for the dissolution of the challenge group.
We sum up, we try to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the team during

the challenge, the reasons for the lack of participation, a critical analysis of the strategies is carried out
adopted etc. (conclusion stage).

BOINC's virtual communities fall under the classification of virtual community

described by Hatch.
In fact, most of the interactions on the network take place through the media
electronic (forums, sites, social networks, youtube, etc.). The communities of BOINC and the
BOINC platform itself arise during a strong technological change in the
our society, namely the widespread access of the internet to the masses. It is difficult to locate
individually, those who offer computing power (in general they are volunteers) because the33Machine Translated by Google

choice on which project to develop is purely individual and therefore
highly decentralized; instead it is well defined who requires computing power (iresearchers), “there is therefore not a single organization that produces goods or services (ooffers computing power) within it, but the manufacturer or supplier is the network
in its entirety" .
The advantages of the network are many88: there is the promotion and sharing of
information that involves the release of decision-making power, in fact the allocationof computing power by the individual volunteer depends on his ethics (thevolunteer can choose a project on the discovery of prime numbers or a project on
cancer cure) and from the availability of wu by projects, there is none
mediation with teams. Virtual communities can incentivize projects withmore effects on the quality of life, for example the administrators of a community
can report more information and news on Rosetta@Home (folding ofproteins) and on Minecraft@Home (which analyzes the seeds of the videogame maps
Minecraft).
The decentralized network of BOINC allows for a lot of information exchange
quickly and in multiple directions at the same time. Forum discussions are almost
all fully accessible (for example, those for theinternal communication between administrators and moderators), this allows a quick
learning not only of the people who are part of the network but also of theexternal actors who can decide whether or not to join the network (e.g. neophyte who reads
a guide on BOINC.Italy) or in any case to obtain explanations or learncomplex information from guides.

If we consider Google and Amazon Web Services as traditional organizations andincumbent, we can define BOINC as a real competitor that hasbrought innovation in the field of data processing by creating an almost delall decentralized unlike the big giants. BOINC is ultra-flexible and has
87 Cunliffe, Hatch, (2013), p. 316
88 Cunliffe, Hatch, (2013), p. 317
34

Machine Translated by Google

created a new concept of organization by unhinging the corporate one andcentralized by Google and Amazon. We cannot know the effects of thischange in the new economy, for the long run on organizations, but, howaffirmed and lived by Anderson, there can hardly be collaborations with
BOINC89 precisely because BOINC is an alternative to paid platforms.
The data processing giants probably won't disappear, but they could
undertake citizen science projects similar to BOINC.

2.6 La gamification
Gamification (or gamification) is “the use of elements borrowed from games and ofgame creation techniques in non-playful contexts”90. They essentially comeinserted characteristic elements of video games, such as points, level up, prizes,
rankings etc., in contexts other than that of the video game.
As for the challenges (official and unofficial) gamification also does not exist
only as part of the structure of BOINC but there are also features ofgamefication created by virtual communities.

2.6.1 The gamification of projects
For example, the Tn-Grid project administrator created a series of badges on thebased on the total credits produced by the individual user. The scale is based on the materials and stones

prezione, the higher the score the more the material is precious in fact at the first levels
we find bronze, silver and gold (Figure 5) instead the maximum level is thepink diamond.

89 https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php#vision site visited 10/10/2022
90 https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification site visited 10/01/202235

Machine Translated by Google

Figure 6: points system
visible in the official project
forum, Antonio Cerrato, 2022,
source: http://gene.disi.unitn.it/test/forum_thread.php?id=130#608

The badges are therefore a sort of visual classification and not just a numerical one.
Visually users, with the badge system, can immediately know if
a user has many or few credits on a given project (Figure 6).

Each project can decide to implement badges that do not depend on the level of thetotal credits. For example World Community Grid has introduced badges, for each
sub-project, based on processing time. You get a badge, for each sub
project, if a user processed for 14, 45, 90, 180 days and for 1 and 2 years. For the36Machine Translated by Google

first 14 days you will get a bronze badge while 2 years of processing yes
will get the sapphire badge (Figure7)

91.

2.6.2 Gamification and signatures on virtual community forums

Users can add a signature, a sort of personal bulletin board, under the
replies in discussions on virtual community forums similar to email signaturese-mail. Within these signatures, users can collect statistics or badges
accumulated over time also from different projects. Conceptually badges are notvery different from military medals and decorations, from badges we can understandthe experience gained over time by the user in a single project and how many projects
the user participates (Figure 8) or even which challenges he has participated in and how he isranked in internal community statistics (Figure 9). As well as medals anddecorations show the experience of the military and its participation in precise
91 https://wcg.fandom.com/wiki/Project_badges site visited 11/10/202237

Machine Translated by Google

military campaigns, badges show user experience and participation(and computing power) during a challenge. For example, the user zioriga has
participated in a series of challenges and in some of them he placed, on the podium, al
third or second place in the internal rankings (therefore not in those between teams) of
BOINC.Italy, the total number of credits generated on BOINC is also shown.

38

Machine Translated by Google

2.7 Analysis of the BOINC.Italy virtual community
In this paragraph, the structure of the main virtual community will be explored
Italian, i.e. that of BOINC.Italy.
The portal (site and forum) of BOINC.Italy officially opens on 22 December 200792, but
one of the first BOINC.Italy teams was created through the SETI@Home project ilMarch 1, 1999, therefore between the foundation of the first teams on the various projects and thebirth of the virtual community portal about 8 years pass.
The portal is made up of 8 main sections.
The first section is the home where the portal is presented and themain news (for example the conclusion of the server migration or the participation in achallenge)93 .
In the second section we find articles of various kinds (scientific news,
presentation articles of BOINC projects, news from BOINC workshops, etc.)
written mainly by administrators, there are also more technical guides(e.g. BOINC server implementation for researchers)94 .
The third section is dedicated to distributed thinking projects and distributed computing(not just by BOINC). Here we find all the useful information for: knowing thescientific objectives of BOINC projects and to access related discussions onforum, access the source codes of the various projects and scientific publications,powerpoints, reports and other documents of distributed computing projects95 .
The fourth section is mainly dedicated to community96 and from here you canaccess different social networks of the community (Facebook, Twitter, Telegram) or amessaging/communication platforms (Freenode, Liberachat). A
subsection is dedicated to initiatives outside the portal, there are for example
descriptions on the improvement activities of the distributed computing pages on
Wikipedia Italy, advertising campaigns or literary competitions or information on
92 https://www.boincitaly.org/blog/annunci/15-apertura-portale-boincitaly.html site visited on 12/10/2022
93 https://www.boincitaly.org site visited on 12/10/2022
94 https://www.boincitaly.org/articoli.html site visited on 12/10/2022
95 https://www.boincitaly.org/progetti/progetti-boinc.html site visited on 12/10/2022
96 https ://www.boincitaly.org/community/iniziative.html site visited on 10/12/202239

Machine Translated by Google

BOINC conferences; however, this section is not very updated and the related
information on the initiatives is mainly communicated on the forum. The logos (Figure10) and banners of BOINC.Italy97 are available in the community section(always made by volunteers) to be included in the signatures of any forum
internet (to attract the attention of any new members to be recruited) and a seriesof prints and flyers to raise awareness of BOINC and BOINC.Italy in case of leafleting orlive events98 .

The fifth section is dedicated to the forum. We can define this section as thebeating heart of the community. The forum is structured in a similar way to the
Rechenkraft.net forum, as explained in the paragraph “2.2 The virtual communities”99 .
The forum is certainly an important section but, as explained precisely
by the administrator Stefano Bologna (nickname "boboviz") social networks, facebook in
in particular, they are useful for possibly conveying people to the forum:“(people ed) They make requests for support on the facebook account and write posts
private on the facebook account to which I reply directly saying “this thing the
I know” or maybe “try to ask it on the forum that there are others” I don't know about linux
I know a little bit. sabayonino (another director of BOINC.Italy ed) of work ago
97 https://www.boincitaly.org/community/loghi-e-banner.html site visited on 12/10/2022
98 https://www.boincitaly.org/community/facciamoci-conoscere.html site visited on 12 /10/2022
99 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum.html site visited on 12/10/202240

Machine Translated by Google

linux programmer. When there is a linux problem I say “look jump on theforum that someone replies to you”. Let's say that the forum is the nucleus, it is the heart. After
there is everything that goes around (social channels, messaging, etc. ed.).”- Conversational interview of 04/10/2022 with Stefano Bologna, director of
BOINC.Italy

The sixth section is dedicated to statistics, both worldwide and interna100. There is a listof BOINC project servers, this way users can know (with a
traffic light system) which projects are active and which are not101 .
The seventh section is dedicated to less technical guides, in fact they are very useful for a first
approach to the BOINC102 platform. In this section you can request
also direct technical support via Skype or messaging channels.
The eighth section is dedicated to announcements and articles on BOINC.Italy103

2.7.1 The roles

Within the BOINC.Italy community there is a minimal hierarchy to manage theportal and its activities. There are currently 3 administrators and 2 moderators.
The management is therefore entrusted to the administrators who implement certain decisions
often in concert with forum users or during face-to-face meetings. To themoderators is entrusted with the task of managing discussions on the forum especially foravoid provocative topics or disputes between users.

Then there are the contacts of the individual projects. Referrers update the individual's thread
project on the forum, therefore they report news regarding scientific news, news
applications or solutions to problems related to the project. Currently the majority
part of the referrers does not seem to be active, the role of referrers has been replaced
mainly by that of administrators or general users.

100 https://www.boincitaly.org/statistiche.html site visited on 12/10/2022
101 https://www.boincitaly.org/statistiche/stato-dei-server.html site visited on 12/10/2022
102 https://www.boincitaly.org/supporto.html site visited on 12/10/2022
103 https://www.boincitaly.org/blog/annunci.html site visited on 12/10/2022

41

Machine Translated by Google

Below each nickname, you can view the relative referent badge(Figure 11).

We have other portal support figures such as the glossary operator (they exist
as we have seen specific terms, bunker tops, in the language of the volunteers of
BOINC) or FAQs104 .

2.7.2 The activities of the volunteers
One of the main activities of the volunteers is certainly that of donating power

calculation to the various BOINC projects but it is purely a passive and almost carried out activity
solely from electronic devices. Computing power donation is not
the only activity.
First, the volunteers update the hardware of electronic devices, fixed PCs
mainly. So there is a significant investment in hardware, in factmeans buying new heatsinks, cpu, gpu, power supplies etc. Some users have
104 https://www.boincitaly.org/community/badge.html site visited on 10/12/202242

Machine Translated by Google

dozens of active cpu, so it means updating, over time, PCs for hundreds if not
thousands of euros.

Passive activities include participation in beta projects, therefore users(betatester) make their PCs available for projects that can cause wu
invalid or in any case errors in processing but which are useful in the early stages ofa project or for the implementation of a new application before distributing it to
all users. Active tasks are of various nature. The simplest are theparticipation in virtual community forums based on your native language, if
the user who knows the English language can participate in the discussions on the official forumsof projects.
Among the more complex activities we have programming, for example theimprove the code of a project. The boboviz admin talks about a real eown volunteering 2.0:

“We define ourselves as volunteers. A form of volunteering 2.0, we define it like this. Froman almost passive form of volunteering, which is the passive one: I install the client, I
I hook into a project and have the computer do everything and that's it. It has forms of
more active volunteering. There are many types of holdings in the BOINC world. From theparticipate in the forum on BOINC.Italy, therefore in Italian. For those who know a little English,
like me, participate in forums also projects. Propose yourself as a beta-tester ofprojects, therefore also making a car available even without having a
Immediate return because often the projects test, the failure of the job is the orderof the day rightly, it's beginning. So many helped, even as it happened on
TnGrid, they made the source code public and a volunteer helped them
optimize your code.

Participation is really active as the projects evolve.
[…] I make translations available if I know a little English. There are now
volunteer programmers who are joining to improve the android app of43

Machine Translated by Google

BOINC. There are many ways to participate based on your own experiences,ability, will and time.”- Conversational interview of 04/10/2022 with Stefano Bologna, director of
BOINC.Italy

Among the other activities we therefore find the translation of texts from English to Italian forincrease people engagement in Italy or localization in languageof the BOINC Manager105. Many Wikipedia entries have been created or expanded
by BOINC.Italy to increase knowledge of the phenomenon also from an encyclopaedic pointof view106 .
The activities of the volunteers, therefore, are projected not only within the community
virtual but also externally to make the world of BOINC known, for example
BOINC.Italy was present with a station at the 2019 Researchers' Nightat MUSE, the science museum of Trento (Figure 12).

105 https://explore.transifex.com/boinc/boinc/ site visited on 14/10/2022
106 https://it.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing&action=history site visited on 14/ 10/2022

44

Machine Translated by Google

2.7.3 Ranks and gamification
Gamification has been adopted not only by researchers but also by communities
virtual. BOINC.Italy, in addition to the signature system, has adopted two other systems
gamification: one for credits and one for the number of replies given on the forum.

The rank system is based on the number of total credits generated, the following exist
gradi107:- yes 0 to 1,000 CREDITS - Adept- from 1,000 to 3,000 CREDITS - Runner- from 3,000 to 10,000 CREDITS - Harvester- from 10,000 to 25,000 CREDITS - GaussianRider- from 25,000 to 50,000 CREDITS - WUDestroyer- from 50,000 to 500,000 CREDITS - xth level Warrior starting from 1st and moving up
level every 50,000 credits- from 500,000 to 1,000,000 CREDITS - xth level Knight starting from the 1st and continuing
level up every 100,000 credits- from 1.000.000 to 10.000.000 CREDITS - x°level Emperor starting from the 1st andlevel up every 1,000,000 credits- from 10,000,000 to 100,000,000 CREDITS - xth level God starting from the 1st and continuing
level up every 10,000,000 credits- from 100,000,000 to 1,000,000,000 CREDITS - xth level Master starting from
1st and level up every 100,000,000 credits- from 1,000,000,000 to 10,000,000,000 CREDITS - xth level Evangelist yes
starts at 1st and levels up every billion credits

107 https://www.boincitaly.org/boincitaly-rss/19-faq/statistiche/1264-che-cosa-sono-i-qgradiq.html site visited on 10/14/202245

Machine Translated by Google

The rank system has been implemented both for individual projects and for the number
total credits (Figure 13). Each rank is associated with a tag that becomesof an increasingly valuable material based on increasing level.
The rank system has also been implemented for the forum based on the number ofanswers given in discussions.
The first levels are witty titles like “abacus” or “calculator”, while for ihigher grades we have titles that rely on RAM (RAM 128 KB; RAM 256

46

Machine Translated by Google

KB; RAM >4GB etc.). There is currently no updated grade legend of theforum108 but are visible in the discussions on the forum (Figure 14).
In addition, there is also a system of thanks: if an answer was satisfactoryor an intervention was particularly appreciated for its completeness, the single
user can click the word “Thank you” below the signature to raise thesingle user's thanks counter (Figure 14).

2.7.4 Gatherings

Among the various activities we also find the meetings of BOINC.Italy in presence. The rallies
are not only a moment to address important discussions such as the

108 https://www.boincitaly.org/boincitaly-rss/20-faq/boincitaly7/2443-i-gradi-del-forum.html site visited on 10/14/202247

Machine Translated by Google

portal management, new recruitment methods, creation of gadgets etc. but
also to create a moment of socialization to strengthen the ties of the group,
especially if the major interdependencies happen digitally.
The first gathering, which was held in Bologna, began with a lunch109 110and thencontinue with the actual meeting with the discussions on the activities of BOINC.Italy111 .

There is a complete report of the meeting on the BOINC.Italy112 forum. Thereparticipation in face-to-face rallies has decreased over time, we have gone from a firstgathering with about twenty people to gatherings with less than ten participants. There
Furthermore, the Covid-19 pandemic did not allow further physical meetings after 2017.
As explained by the Sabayonino administrator, both the geographical fragmentation andpersonal commitments have reduced the number of face-to-face gatherings, plus it gives us arallies overview:“Now the events are sporadic, whether due to work or personal commitments, it's not easy
coordinate and organize meetings with people who come from different partsof the peninsula, however, there are local micro-meetings with geographically close users
easier to organise. Every once in a while it happens to make some. What was talked about?
Among "NERD" users we talk about hardware, software and anything else accompanied by agood healthy lunch-meeting.
Among the site managers we mainly discuss technical problems and updates
precisely the server that keeps up the forum, the donations of the volunteers who allow
to stay "on", gadgets for the participants.
The last event organized was a visit to the Medicine Radio Telescope“Marcello Ceccarelli”, in 2017 (https:// www.boincitaly.org/ forum/ spazio-gruppi-e
community/ 114373-meeting-nord-est-2017.html?start=0#123844)”

109 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uai9GJVrKo&t=1s site visited on 14/10/2022
110 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-ohzBXai74 site visited on 14/10 /2022
111 https://www.boincitaly.org/blog/annunci/152-meetingitaly-tutti-i-dettagli.html site visited on 14/10/2022
112 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum/boincitaly /29952-resoconto-discussione-meeting-bologna.html site visited on 10/14/2022

48

Machine Translated by Google- Email interview dated 10/13/2022 with sabayonino, administrator of
BOINC.Italy

In addition to face-to-face rallies, the virtual community also organized online rallies to implement
the ideas and activities of BOINC.Italy113. Communications today
take place mainly through the forum, WhatsApp and Telegram.

2.7.5 The BOINC.Italy Challenges Itshould be highlighted how the challenges can celebrate or commemorate events orscientists who have played an important role in the scientific area of the projectchoice.
For example, the Italian community created, in 2013, the “Rita Levi-Montalcini memorial” tohonor the important Italian scientist114. The initiative arrived atits sixth edition. The projects chosen for the challenge have a medical theme.

This is how the community explains the motivation for naming a challenge after Rita
Levi-Montalcini:“We passionate about Distributed Computing, who voluntarily dedicate timeand resources to scientific research, we believe that there is no better way toinaugurate the first BOINC.Italy Challenge, dedicating it to one of the mostgreat scientists of our time. This great researcher has often opened theroad to decisive discoveries and, thanks to its authority, it was always present
in Italian public life, giving his contribution to the country in many ways ereceiving in return the sincere affection and gratitude of the citizens. […]”

113 https://www.boincitaly.org/blog/annunci/208-3d-meeting-online.html site visited on 10/14/2022
114 https://www.boincitaly.org/137-uncategorised/2727-ritalevi -montalcini2013.html site visited on 10/17/202249

Machine Translated by Google

The challenge also aims to make the scientist's discoveries known to the whole
BOINC community, not only the Italian one, in fact the article, which celebrates the initiative, hasbeen translated into English115 and German116 .
In addition to the commemorative challenges that are regularly repeated over the years, vi
they can be unique challenges celebrating discoveries and anniversaries
very precise. On the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of Kepler's third law,
BOINC.Italy paid homage to this important scientific discovery by naming achallenge, on the Asteroids@home project, to the famous astronomer: “400 years from Kepler'sHarmonic Law”117. Furthermore, in the Italian thread, a user recommended readings on the laws
discovered by Kepler118 .

2.7.6 The language of the community
Many words used by both the international and Italian communities of
BOINC are part of the lexicon of the computer science field (linux, drivers, calculus
distributed, etc.) so there is not much difference between the computer lexicon usedin and out of the world of BOINC.
Particular terms have appeared several times, even in this paper (such as "bunker")
to describe an event, function, strategy, object, etc. for what concern
BOINC world. Actually there are some terms that can have acertain valence in everyday language (or none) but have a different
meaning in the world of BOINC. The bunker, for example, is a type of
fortification, but in the world of BOINC it is the accumulation and release of large numbersof elaborations in a short time, a sort of insurmountable wall which, however, is of no use for
defend but rather to have an advantage over the other teams in the challenges (the bunker
from a means of defense it becomes a sort of means of attack). The Italian community has

115 https://www.boincitaly.org/137-uncategorised/2737-rita-levi-montalcinieng.html site visited on 10/17/2022
116 https://www.boincitaly.org/staff/137-uncategorised/2736 -challenge-levi-montalcini-deu.html?showall=1&limitstart= site visited on 17/10/2022
117 https://www.boincstats.com/stats/challenge/team/chat/992 site visited on 17/10/
2022 118 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum/statistiche-sfide-e-traguardi/114722-challenge-keplero-asteroids-8-3-8-00-15-3-8-00.html?start= 0 site visitedon 10/17/202250

Machine Translated by Google

acquired and adapted the language, especially slang terms, from English
in Italian. Many of these terms are part of BOINC's own culture.
Currently the glossary page on the BOINC.Italy portal cannot be visited119,

so I used “Way Back Machine” to recover some terms. The lexicon,
shown below, it is still widely used by the community.
Here are some examples:- Scaccolare120: slang for “Elaborare”, “Calculate”. In English, the is often used
word “Crunching” which stands for “to crunch”.
- Criceto121: slang and joking term for “Computer”. In English it comes sometimes
used the literal translation “Hamster”.
- Joinare122: slang for "Join" or join a team.
- Uppare123: Jargon for "Do the upload" or send the data to the server.

Also using the Way Back Machine it is possible to recover the lexicon of the fieldcomputer science and distributed computing124, there are, for example, terms that have already been analysedsuch as “BOINC Manager” and “Account Manager” or basic IT terms
such as graphics card, operating system, etc.
Both computer and slang terms have also been translated or adapted in othercommunities such as the German one125

2.7.7 The costs of maintaining the BOINC.Italy portal
The maintenance of the portal has a series of costs which are borne by the community
BOINC.Italy.
119 https://www.boincitaly.org/supporto/glossario.html site visited on 10/17/2022
120 https://web.archive.org/web/20110526120656/http://www.boincitaly.org/supporto /glossario/Gergo-2/S/ site visited on 10/17/2022
121 https://web.archive.org/web/20110526120708/http://www.boincitaly.org/supporto/glossario/Gergo-2/ C/ site visited on 17/10/2022
122 https://web.archive.org/web/20110526122437/http://www.boincitaly.org/supporto/glossario/Gergo-2/J/ site visited on 17/ 10/2022
123 https://web.archive.org/web/20110526120646/http://www.boincitaly.org/supporto/glossario/Gergo-2/U/ site visited on 10/17/2022
124 https:/ /web.archive.org/web/20110722143428/http://www.boincitaly.org/supporto/glossario/Termini-tecnici-1/all/ site visited on 17/10/2022
125 https://www.rechenkraft. net/wiki/index.php?title=Kategorie:Technik site visited 17/10/2022

51

Machine Translated by Google

Let's take for example the year 2021:
Cost of purchase and renewal of server + services (email, domain, etc.): €90.10€ 10

Template:
TOTAL: €100.10

The costs of the portal are borne by the volunteers through the donations page126, i
There are many methods to donate (bank transfer, PayPal, PostePay, etc.).
it is also possible to donate using cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero,
Ethereum, Litecoin.
There are ad hoc fundraising campaigns to stimulate donations (eg.
“Donation campaign 2020”127
All income and expenses are collected in a single online spreadsheet accessible from the
donation page128. The
respective invoice.
From 2007 to 2022 BOINC.Italy raised €7,239.41 and spent €7,034.16
for maintaining the portal.

126 https://www.boincitaly.org/donazioni.html site visited on 17/10/2022
127 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum/boincitaly/115081-campagna-donazioni-2020.html site visited on 17 /10/2022
128 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bEpxvhJgGJSlzEJ_qC5ePdDiS9131uU454nIrEf-Mng/edit#gid=0 site visited on 10/17/2022

52

Machine Translated by Google

Chapter 3 Survey with non-probability sample of the virtual community of BOINC.Italy:
demographics, motivations and activities

What are the actual activities and to what extent are they carried out by the volunteers of
BOINC.Italy?
To answer this question, I administered a questionnaire to the community
virtual BOINC.Italy to analyze the activities carried out by the group.
The sampling performed is non-probability and the sample is self-selected.
It is almost impossible to define a population for two main reasons: there is no one
single team (there is a “BOINC.Italy” team for each project) and the virtual community isvery fluid so it is impossible to determine who is actually part of thecommunity and who is not (for example in the month of September there were 40 accesses fromof 40 different users).
The population of BOINC.Italy, taking into account only the BOINC.Italy portal and not theindividual teams, is equal to 3896 users129 (Figure 15).

129 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum/profilo/list.html?start=3870

53

Machine Translated by Google

Some users may have created more than one account. Also some users havecreated an account on the BOINC.Italy portal to be active only for a few days.
Other volunteers may only follow the Twitter or Facebook account of
BOINC.Italy by participating only in discussions on social networks.
The questionnaire was published on the BOINC.Italy130 forum. The administrators
they independently published the questionnaire both on their telegram channel and on their Facebook
page131 .
The number of respondents was 21.
The questionnaire and data processing can be consulted through the link in the following note132
or in the "Data and processing" section at the end of the processing.
The first question of the questionnaire concerns the age of the volunteers

130 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum/boincitaly/115265-questionario-per-il-team-di-boinc-italy-tesi-magistrale,-corso-app,-unimi.html#137937 website
site visited on 10/15/2022
131 https://www.facebook.com/boincitaly/posts/
pfbid02wQSRf41L5vZTSXe3NLkNtc95GCUMyCNsJX9NKBoED6bCuUyHjgWfTQ6qpYuWdABPl site site visited on 15/10/2022
132 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xschMGjrJog7I4kFZeGvwro4vgfKAxc-L5ykhFM5fAo/edit?usp=sharing

54

Machine Translated by Google

As you can see (Graph 1) BOINC.Italy is not frequented by minors but it isfrequented above all by people between the ages of 30 and 50 (47.62%).

As regards the gender of the respondents (Graph 2), we can note a low
participation of women, while participation by men is a lot
high. It is currently not possible to determine the cause of low participationof women to distributed computing, probably the causes are to be found not in theplatform itself (there are no entry barriers for the genre) but the causes
may be exogenous.

55

Machine Translated by Google

Respondents were asked for the qualification obtained (Graph 3)
We can see how compared to the ISTAT 2011133 census, the volunteers of
BOINC.Italy have a higher education qualification than the Italian average. None of
respondents have an elementary school diploma as their highest educational qualification; mostof respondents have a secondary school diploma and form the57.14% of respondents, while graduates (three-year degree and master's degree or asingle cycle) are 33.4% of respondents. As with the average license, there are none
PhD volunteers.

133 http://dati-censimentopopolazione.istat.it/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=DICA_TITSTUDIO site approved on 10/16/2022

56

Machine Translated by Google

As regards the profession (Chart 4) we can see that 23.81% of
respondents work in the field of information technology and electronics, 14.29% of
respondents consisted of pensioners and 14.29% were students. The passion for
information technology could be one of the variables influencing the decision in theparticipate in distributed computing, not surprisingly distributed computing, first on SETI andthen on BOINC, it starts to catch on right in the early years of usage expansionof the internet.

Respondents were asked what are the main motivations for supporting the
distributed computing. Respondents could choose up to a maximum of 3 answers,
no user has decided to enter a further answer to those presented.
As we can see (Graph 5) all respondents selected “I want
help in the progress of scientific research”, 3 users selected the option ofsocialization. Even the challenges don't seem to have an impact on motivation
towards distributed computing.

57

Machine Translated by Google

Only one user selected the "earnings through cryptocurrencies" option. TO
BOINC can be hooked an Account Manager which allows you to get acryptocurrency (Gridcoin) through the credit system (this cryptocurrency will comebriefly described in chapter 4 to understand the views of the volunteers and theresearchers).
The main motivation is undoubtedly to help researchers in the elaboration ofdata.

It was also asked, with an open-ended question (question n. 6), what they are
were the reasons that led to support distributed computing and researchscientific. Several answers have been given. Summarizing the opinions it emerged that thescientific progress helps the whole community and increases the common welfare. 2 users
have signaled that they have joined distributed computing in order not to keep les idle
Unused CPUs or to make the most of old PCs. 1 user points out that theresources for scientific research are scarce by the state why it is58Machine Translated by Google

merged with BOINC. Another user explains that he has decided to donate computing power
because he would have liked to undertake scientific studies if he could.
The main motivation is therefore scientific research but with different nuances
ranging from philanthropy to optimizing CPU usage.

The champion was asked what activities are done in addition to donating power ofproject calculation.
13 users maintain and upgrade hardware to improve or
optimize the power of your PC or to donate more computing power.
11 users participate in the discussions on the BOINC.Italy forum while only 6 users
participate in discussions on project sites (probably because of the barrier
linguistics). A small minority of the sample carries out help desk activities
helping other users with problems with the software. 2 users help debugging
and coding computational projects.
Clearly for these latter activities you need to have computer knowledge
advanced.

59

Machine Translated by Google

Active recruitment of new members is very low as is participation in ads
events in attendance while the leafleting has not been selected by users(probably also due to the recent pandemic). The activities are done
mainly through electronic devices and at a distance.
3 users, on the other hand, declared that they did not carry out any of the activities listed, but
to donate only computing power. These 3 users only perform passive activities
with very little interaction with the Italian community.

For the hours dedicated to BOINC activities each month (thepassive donation of computing power) (Chart 7) we can note two main ones
groups of volunteers: an average group dedicates a few hours a month to the activities(maximum 2 hours) and is equal to 38.09% of the sample; while another group, 57.14%of the sample, spend more than 10 hours a month volunteering on distributed computing. A
small percentage, 4.76%, dedicates between 2 and 5 hours per month to activities related to60

Machine Translated by Google

distributed computing. Essentially we can divide the virtual community of
BOINC.Italy into two groups, one is formed by very active users and the other by users
inactive.

N.b.:* Questions 10 and 11 of the questionnaire will be analyzed in chapter 4 while theanswers of question 12 will be useful for some food for thought in chapter 561

Machine Translated by Google

Chapter 4 The role of researchers and their relationship with volunteers. The function ofcompanies in the BOINC network

Also the researchers-administrators have a very important role in the network of
BOINC. They are the ones who ask for computing power and who set ed times
project goals. They take care of the communication of the forums and announce the resultsscientists to volunteers also collaborate with public and private bodies.
The contribution of enterprises to distributed computing on BOINC will also be analysed, inin particular IBM's World Community Grid project will be described.
Volunteers and the administrator of the Italian Tn-Grid project were asked for theirs
point of view on various issues related to distributed computing through interviews
discursive or email interviews.

N.b.:*Full interviews are available via the section “Text files, video files ed
audio, data and processing" at the end of the report or through the link in the following note134
4.1 BOINC projects in the Italian academic world, the types of projects and the causes ofunderutilization of BOINC in Italy
BOINC is still an underused tool in academia, and inparticularly in Italy it is a little-known platform. There is currently only one active
Italian project/container, Tn-Grid, which in turn hosts the gene@home project.
There are two other Italian projects that have achieved their goals or have
had trouble creating it. For example the project of the University of Catania
had a very short life, while the SIMONE@home project, a project by a
PhD student at the University of Milan, he has had good success since
shorten the research times that the PhD student had set.

134 https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QQuGK7dIe8aEI9Dg9uBIPz3aWqGcsvru?usp=sharing
62

Machine Translated by Google

4.1.1 SIMONE@home
According to the BOINC.Italy portal, SIMONE@home's goal was to carry out“a research in the medical field that allows us to deepen the determination
computational analysis of the free energy change for a transformation, in particular ofan unfolding process of a small polypeptide”135 .
The cost of the project was less than 500 euros. He allowed the PhD tosave a lot of time as admitted by the administrator of BOINC.Italy:“That's the classic project that I call "doctoral" [..] there are doctoral students
that, to carry out the doctoral thesis, need computing power. Viva
god then, either your university or your research center has the power ofcalculation, and he doesn't always give it to you, or do as Simone did who did a
spot project. He got a computer at his house, not even a very powerful computer.
This is another thing you can do. He did the project. His was done
server at home and from his home he distributed work which then returned to him. [..] He did thedoctoral thesis with a homemade BOINC project, in the true sense ofword: inside his house. [..] Here this is another very strange thing, that is who is who
he thought "can I do a research, a scientific project at home?". […] At the start
there were 5 or 6 of us, then he opened it to a hundred people and its adsl line ofhome was a bit under stress but within 4 months he brought home the result. “Interviewer: "So with less than 1000 euros, he will have created ... (ed.) a project
BOINC)”“Much less, much less than 1000 euros. It was an 8 core, with 16GB of ram or maybe
even less, 8 GB of ram.
He was very pleased, he said “if I had to wait to get in line for
applying to the university, the time machine” … the days went by. Of course then
135 https://www.boincitaly.org/staff/137-uncategorised/1857-simonehome.html site visited on 22/10/2022

63

Machine Translated by Google

he got his PhD and closed the project. But also many abroad. . . i them
I call doctoral project. They last 3, 4, 5 (ed months) that is, they are temporary, but it is not
a problem. We're still helping someone in need, meanwhile. We aredoing science and there is no problem. [...] We do not discriminate between you
you're Berkeley or you're the last faculty [...] even better. […] If you are small and needhelp even better.”- Conversational interview of 04/10/2022 with Stefano Bologna, director of
BOINC.Italy

4.1.2 Tn-Grid
Tn-Grid (Trento Grid) is a container of BOINC projects. It currently hosts thegene@home project whose goal is to find causal relationships between genes. The algorithmof gene@home amplifies gene regulatory networks (or GRNs) that usually
understand correlations between two genes. Gene@home aims to estimate possible relationships
between a list of new genes and the already known gene regulatory network136 .
The initial goal of Tn-Grid was to create a container for projects based on
BOINC, for Trentito-Alto Adige therefore not only for the University of Trento
but also for other entities. It is currently involved, among the universities, only
the University of Trento.

The institutions involved in the platform (and in gene@home) are the following: University ofTrento, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI),
Department of Cellular, Computational and Integrative Biology (CIBIO), Fondazione
Bruno Kessler (research institution of the Autonomous Province of Trento, which deals
mainly of computer science and physics), the Edmund Mach Foundation (a body that yes
deals with research in the field of biology) and the Trento Research Area of
National Research Council of Italy.
To simplify, the CNR and the University of Trento take care of the infrastructure
computer science and BOINC's science applications writing. The foundation
136 https://gene.disi.unitn.it/test/genehome/en/description/basic-description.php site visited on 23/10/202264

Machine Translated by Google

Edmund Mach is responsible for providing the biology gene datasets and CIBIO provides thehuman gene datasets; both analyze data processed by volunteers.
Currently there is no researcher or PhD student who deals only with Tn
Grid, since there are no resources to dedicate solely to the BOINC project, therefore theworking hours on Tn-Grid are part of the hours devoted to scientific researchjob description of technical collaborators and researchers. The people directly involved
in Tn-Grid there are about ten, not counting students and PhDs that they are
been involved over time.
We can therefore define the research group as a task force.

4.1.3 The costs of Tn-Grid
I estimated the costs of creating a small project for the BOINC platformtaking Tn-Grid costs as an example.
For the hardware part, Tn-Grid uses a virtualized machine with 4 cores and 4 GB
of RAM. A similar machine has a very low cost (about 300 – 400 euros) and it is
only a one-off initial cost.

Electricity, broadband and storage costs are covered by the university.
Being very low costs we can define them negligible. Wishing anyway
calculating these costs, for a natural person and not for a public body, would be ifollowing:- data archiving: 100 euros per year for 2 tera of archiving, taking into
consider the services of Google137 the cost of a fiber optic internet line costs around 25 euros per month 138, therefore 300
euros per year
- the electricity cost for a quadcore server is around 100 euros per year
Electricity, internet line and storage would cost around 500 euros a year.

137 https://one.google.com/about/plans?hl=it site visited on 24/10/2022
138 https://offer-internet.it/fibra-ottica site visited on 24/10/2022

65

Machine Translated by Google

So for the first year, the BOINC project would cost 900 euros. Years
subsequent only 500 euros per year (the cost of maintenance is negligible).
The major cost could be related to human capital if Tn-Grid had a teamor a researcher as personnel dedicated to the distributed computing project only, but thescientific production of Tn-Grid falls within the working hours dedicated to research.
For example, in the event of the introduction of a new application, they can be dedicatedeven 10 days of work, while in the case of ordinary management the working hours are yes
substantially reduce having to monitor the progress of the project.
A researcher in Italy, on average, receives a salary of around 39,000 euros139
therefore the main cost of a small-medium BOINC project is linked above all
to any staff dedicated solely to the BOINC project.

139 https://www.payscale.com/research/IT/Job=Research_Scientist/Salary site visited on 24/10/2022

66,

Machine Translated by Google

Computing power, in general, comes at a cost. If the volunteer computers on Tn
Grids have a computing power of approximately 30,000 GigaFLOPS (Figure 16)
we can convert and approximate this power to about 6,000 CPUs ( 1 CPUIntel(R) Core(TM) i7 = 5 GigaFLOPS140).
The cost to activate 4 CPUs (on Milan), based on the prices offered by Amazon EC2, isequal to about 0.15 dollars per hour141, therefore about 1,300 euros per year.
The same computing power as Tn-Grid would cost around 1,950,000 euros a year, but
thanks to the volunteers it is a cost of 0 euro.

140 https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/cpu_list.php site visited on 10/24/2022
141 https://aws.amazon.com/it/ec2/pricing/on-demand/ site visited on 10/23/2022

67

Machine Translated by Google

4.1.4 The algorithm: generic or specific?
We can distinguish two types of projects based on their duration. The first
type, very useful for doctoral research, lasts a few months and does not need toparticular computing power. The second type of project has a duration of
medium-long term and needs a lot of computing power.
The temporal distinction also depends a lot on the type of algorithm adopted;
in case of generic algorithm the algorithm can be applied to many datasets and therefore theproject can have a long duration, in case of specific algorithm they canuse a few datasets and probably only those created by the research group therefore
the computing power to be used is minimal because the calculation is short-lived:“To have serious use of BOINC or you have a very generic algorithm, like foldingof a protein, which has a very generic algorithm that you can run on
n-thousand protein forever, okay? […] Or very basic algorithms. In that case there it isuseful, research groups often don't have this kind of need here. […]Our algorithm (gene@home's ed) works because it's a very algorithm
generic, that is, it is an algorithm that practically searches, in a slightly stronger way thanwhat is the concept of correlation, of finding causal relationships between variables. We
we apply this to genetic datasets, however everywhere you have a set of variables with gods
experimental values you can apply those algorithms there, so you can apply it
also to humanistic, financial data.”- Conversational interview of 06/10/2022 with Valter Cavecchia, director of
Tn-Grid and Technical Collaborator of Research Bodies at CNR-IMEM, headquarters
Trent secondary school

68Machine Translated by Google

4.1.5 Why is BOINC little used in Italian universities?
As regards the use of BOINC in Italian universities, there would be threecauses for its low usage: Research groups with BOINC get too muchcomputing power, there is a fear of changing the method and/or approach to research and in
overall there is rudder in change and ultimately there are few career options incase of multidisciplinary scientific publications.
For the first cause in the case of short-term scientific research calculations, it is convenient
use university or research center resources. The cost, in terms of cost
opportunity, for the creation and implementation of the BOINC server and the project(simplifying: server creation, algorithm writing, site creation,
involvement of the first volunteers etc.) is initially high and then in case of calculations
short it is better to use computing power within the institution to which they belong or
buy it on the market.

“The problem with using BOINC is that, BOINC dramatically increases thecomputing power you have available. So BOINC is of no use in solving the
research group problem that has a bill to do and takes 2 months. Whythat bill to do, which takes 2 months, with BOINC you do it in 1 day. Less into
reality, but then between realization and everything. What if you have nothing more to do? What are you doing?

That is, there is overhead to put up a BOINC system and to adjust the algorithm,
check if the algorithm at least has checkpoints, if there is a pattern ofvalidation that doesn't exist, which maybe isn't necessary if you do it on machines let's saythat you trust. And so too fast a count in the end is meaningless, wait for these twomonths and over. It's much more efficient. Starting at par probably perhaps arrives
account first without BOINC.”- Conversational interview of 06/10/2022 with Valter Cavecchia, director of
Tn-Grid and Technical Collaborator of Research Bodies at CNR-IMEM, headquarters
Trent secondary school69

Machine Translated by Google

So researchers should evaluate whether a lot of power is actually needed
computational or not. The result of the decision is based on the economic concept of “makeor buy”142 .

Researchers should consider buying computing power or using
machines of the institution (buy) if:- the algorithm is very specific, so it cannot be used in other contexts
research (so you need little computing power)- contracts to buy computing power do not contain many clauses aagainst the research groups and therefore there is no actual situation of opportunism on the partof the supplier (holdup problem143), for example: increase in the price of
CPU over time based on any maintenance costs- the search requires little power but must be continuous, constant and based on theneed of the researcher- the calculation times are very short and short-term (less than 4 - 6 months)

Research groups should consider creating a BOINC project(make) this :- the algorithm is generic and reusable- provide for short and medium term calculations (4 - 6 months minimum)- a lot of computing power is needed for the research question- low budget to allocate to hardware- they can devote part of their time to communicating with volunteers

142 Besanko D., Dranove, D, Shanley M., Schaefer S., (2017), Economia dell'industria e strategie d'impresa, pp 119 - 155
143 Besanko D., Dranove, D, Shanley M., Schaefer S ., (2017), Economia dell'industria e strategie d'impresa, p. 147

70

Machine Translated by Google

A second cause is in the search paradigms. Research groups tend tothey innovate little in their research models144 because they already produce a good number ofscientific publications:“Plus there's a fairly strong inertia in the research that we essentially say iestablished groups tend to put together, we call it “the paper mill”, one
scheme in which many publications are made because your career and your ability toraising funds is proportional to the number of publications you have. [..] People
tends to be conservative in its search patterns.”- Conversational interview of 06/10/2022 with Valter Cavecchia, director of
Tn-Grid and Technical Collaborator of Research Bodies at CNR-IMEM, headquarters
Trent secondary school

The third cause is multidisciplinarity which means, for a researcher, having to
publish scientific articles not in a single journal but in multiple journals. This entails
not having numerous scientific publications in a single field but many
publications divided into several sectors (and therefore in several journals). It could be a strong one
entry barrier for those wishing to use BOINC. So the researchers, for reasons
career, they cannot divide their publications in several journals.

“Multidisciplinarity today is not even very profitable today because, to me
the scientific career is of no interest, but if you choose the scientific career you mustchoose a sector, from those of the Miur, and you have to publish in magazines that belong
to that sector over there. That is, my publications are in completely different sectors
from each other and therefore do not count. They count for very little. […] If you are a physicist
which also does computer science aspects, or you publish only in physics journals or only in journals
information technology. If you do it on both, when you submit your resume for a

144 Corbetta P., (2020), Social research: methodology and techniques. The paradigms of reference, p. 13

71

Machine Translated by Google

competition, you have to choose one of the two. This mechanism makes it difficult
move around, right?”- Conversational interview of 06/10/2022 with Valter Cavecchia, director of
Tn-Grid and Technical Collaborator of Research Bodies at CNR-IMEM, headquarters
Trent secondary school

4.2 Communication between researchers and volunteers
Users can be informed of individual project developments in various ways.
Surely one of the easiest ways to communicate with users is through the section“Notices” from the BOINC Manager. Here are essentially the messages ofnotice of the home of the individual projects.
The same notice is published in the "News" section of the project forum.
Notices, or minor communications, can also be published on social networks
network as in the case of Rosetta@Home.
In fact, the Rosetta@Home Twitter page retweeted, for example, a postof the Institute for Protein Design announcing entry into phase 3 ofexperimentation of the vaccine to counter the Covid-19145 .
The vaccine was obtained, in part, thanks to the computing power of volunteers
BOINC (in July 2022 South Korea purchased a batch of 10 million doses146).

As we saw in Chapter 2, virtual communities are also engaged incommunicate notices and news on the progress of projects through the various
virtual community forum discussions; think for example of the referents ofprojects for the BOINC.Italy community.
In some cases there has not always been a particular attention in the communication frompart of the administrators-researchers of the projects. For example, the Rosetta@Home twitter
account was inactive from April 5, 2017147 to March 18, 2020148 (about 3
145 https://twitter.com/UWproteindesign/status/1520106011830366208 site visited 10/18/2022
146 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=15029#106480 site visited 10/18 /2022
147 https://twitter.com/RosettaAtHome/status/849721992202924032 site visited 10/18/2022
148 https://twitter.com/RosettaAtHome/status/1240174183595659264 site visited 10/18/2022

72

Machine Translated by Google

years of inactivity). Fortunately, warnings on the forum are much more frequent, in thethe same period there were 24 notices/scientific news on the project149 .

4.2.1 Communication management
Often the lack of communication from researchers creates a sense offrustration and abandonment by volunteers who devote cycles of computing and theown free time to BOINC projects.
It may happen that there are server malfunctions but, in some cases, thesemalfunctions are not communicated on the site and often volunteers point it out
this lack of communication.
For example, at the end of October 2021 there were problems with the project
Rosetta@Home.
The user "Sid Celery" reports, on 27 October 2021 (20:13:19 UTC), that the project
was stopped for a quick change in the filesystem, also the feeder (aof the server) of Rosetta would seem not to work150. Other users start reporting
further problems, for example the number of processes that must be
validated by the server begin to be much higher than the number of processings
which have already been validated.

On October 31st the TSD user loses his patience and begins like this “As usual there isno information about what is happening. I don't know what I am doing here151” that is“As usual, no information on what's going on. I don't know what's there
I do here” (meaning it could donate computing time to projects they haveactually processing to be distributed to volunteers instead of waiting for any
elaborations on Rosetta).
After which the user announces his/her departure from the BOINC platform to join
to the platform, also of distributed computing, Folding@Home.
Another user, Bryn Mawr, tries to minimize the problems152 .
149 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_forum.php?id=202 site visited on 10/18/2022
150 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=6893&postid=103032 #103032 site visited 10/18/2022
151 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=6893&postid=103067#103067 site visited 10/18/2022
152 https://boinc.bakerlab .org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=6893&postid=103069#103069 site visited on 10/18/202273

Machine Translated by Google

Again the TSD user points out to the user Bryn Mawr that he is not interested in the credits
and that he doesn't want weekly updates but updates every 5 weeks would be enough for
him153 .
Another user, [VENETO] boboviz, with a certain amount of sarcasm, replies totwo other users that for him an update every 5 months instead of every 5 weeks would beenough154, emphasizing how updates on problems oron the novelties of the project are few and after a long time.
The wu validation problem would seem to have been resolved on November 2nd,
as announced by user Grant (SSSF)155. Meanwhile, no administrator-wanted
replied to the technical problems thread, in fact there was no reassurance
towards users (who meanwhile continued to make hardware available, withthe related costs in energy terms, totally free) or the notice of atechnical problem with the server.

10 days later, on November 12, there are new server problems and it comesalways announced by a user and not by an administrator156. Le wu that volunteers
processing via virtualbox would seem to have numerous problems, and none
researcher informed users of any problems.
Also the user boboviz, on November 14, declares “I hope that ALL of these
problems with virtual wu will, however, contribute to strengthening the researchscience of the project. But it's clear that they have a LOT of trouble interfacing with ivolunteers”157. Meanwhile, more experienced users have recommended ways tosolve the problem. On November 15, two more users leave the Rosetta project forunirsi a World Community Grid e a Tn-Grid.
On November 16, user Jim1348 scolds researchers and project administrators because
the only result is wasted users' time158

153 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=6893&postid=103070#103070 site visited on 10/18/2022
154 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id =6893&postid=103072#103072 site visited on 10/18/2022
155 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=6893&postid=103087#103087 site visited on 10/18/2022
156 https:/ /boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=6893&postid=103178#103178 site visited 10/18/2022
157 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=6893&postid=103279 #103279 site visited on 10/18/2022
158 https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=6893&postid=103349#103349 site visited on 10/18/2022

74

Machine Translated by Google

Meanwhile, no researcher or administrator has revealed himself in this period of time,
only the most experienced users have tried to ease the tension.
One of the administrators of Tn-Grid, currently the only Italian project on
BOINC, explains how communication is a fundamental factor for the
maintenance of a project, for the aggregation of users on the forum and above allon the calculation:“Communication is key. [...] You know how it is, don't you? Problems canalways happen, it's obvious isn't it? Then a system administrator or a researcher
system or one inside the system who simply says “look what we haveproblems, we don't know when we'll fix them” this works a hundred times betterin terms of maintaining rapport versus saying nothing.
[…] Tell the truth. To say that simply that there are problems, in fact that
What I don't understand are forums where people ask questions and nobody answers. […]It seems that they go by inertia (ed referring to other projects), it's a thing ofvolunteer, right? When one participates in volunteer stuff, and put that you alreadyDo you want to participate in BOINC, why do you choose this project? Well, for a thousand reasons thatin the end, they are the same reasons why you decide if you want to give six pennies to an NGO that
deals with social and you decide one, that is, money is limited right? What are thecriteria? Among the criteria there are also, so to speak, criteria given by the communication. Meaning what

what do I know, I give money to Emergency and Emergecy sends me a papyrus every year which
he explains to me, by line and by sign, where he spent the money. [...] It seems to me a factor
important. […] Communication is fundamental.”- Conversational interview of 06/10/2022 with Valter Cavecchia, director of
Tn-Grid and Technical Collaborator of Research Bodies at CNR-IMEM, headquarters
Trent secondary school

Users can also help administrators with problem management
communication. The discussions are many and clearly the time of the researchers is75

Machine Translated by Google

limited, so the researcher-administrators have to decide which threads
answer and which ones not, moreover it is not certain that they are able to identify the problems beforeof users (the users participating in the project forums are dozens if not
hundreds, while researchers are clearly fewer).
Again the administrator of Tn-Grid explains the role of users in the management andcommunication on the Trentino project forum:“Often (users' note) they notice that something is wrong, they warn me like “lookthat the server is down”. Yes, they are useful. For example, they often solve problems for meof communication that is in the sense. As I am convinced that the part ofcommunication is important to keep, in short, the volunteers a little tied toproject sometimes the volunteers ask questions which, however, are answered by others
volunteers. This saves me time to give the answer. [...]
There's been a whole talk between users lately about whether it's more useful from the pointfrom an energy point of view, use FMA applications rather than those without SSE2. That
speech there that was interesting but they carried it forward in the user group,
I didn't have to intervene.
Often, let's say, answers are given, I'll give a trivial example. There is a user who
he protests [...] he says “but what, you act as user of the day someone who hasn't been for 7 years

doing nothing for the project” this is something BOINC really does. I havegave a first reply, 8 august, then at some point this AnandBhat has
explained everything and so on. Practically it was more exhaustive, that is
I could have done it too, but he explained well how the system works.”- Conversational interview of 06/10/2022 with Valter Cavecchia, director of
Tn-Grid and Technical Collaborator of Research Institutions at CNR-IMEM,
branch office in Trento

Again we can see an example of citizen science in the citizen
science: having to continuously respond to users would be costly in terms of76

Machine Translated by Google

time, especially in projects with few administrators, therefore more expert users
they help researchers by answering other users' questions without waiting for one
official answer or expanding on the researchers' answer. This results in savings
time for researchers who can invest the same: in answering the questions
more complex, in alerts or research activities. It must be borne in mind that i
researchers, in effect, manage virtual communities similar toteam admins.

4.3 Gridcoin: is it ethically right to earn from volunteering? The point of view of
researchers and volunteers
Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency from the world of BOINC. It is not an official cryptocurrency,that is, it was not conceived by the University of California, Berkeley or by Anderson
but it was created by a third party. Gridcoin was officially launched on October 16, 2013 by
Rob Halförd159 (nickname of Gridcoin creator whose identity iscurrently unknown).
Essentially volunteers are rewarded with this cryptocurrency based on theircontributed via calculation within the BOINC platform.
1 Gridcoin (GRC) is worth around $0.01160 and the value of the cryptocurrency is stable aroundthat dollar value.
Users can mine currency alone or in a group (called a "pool").
Gridcoin has had a significant impact on virtual communities. BOINC was born as a tool ofvolunteering but today it is also a way to earn. Gridcoin had no effectnegatives on research, indeed large cryptocurrency teams/pools have made it stable
the supply of computing power.

“If you look at the statistics (Tn-grid's ed) among the top participants apart from Helmut[...] and Technologov […]. In terms of history, the 3 gridcoin pools and the 2 charity engines
they are the ones with the highest total credit because they are constant, maybe they don't have peaks
159 https://gridcoin.us/wiki/ site visited on 10/23/2022
160 https://crypto.com/price/gridcoin site visited on 10/23/2022

77

Machine Translated by Google

as the volunteer with the participating farm for 1 month. But if you put the tops in order
total credits, they are the only ones with the purple diamond badge.”- Conversational interview of 06/10/2022 with Valter Cavecchia, director of
Tn-Grid and Technical Collaborator of Research Bodies at CNR-IMEM, headquarters
Trent secondary school

In virtual communities the debate is still open: there are those who are in favor of the entry ofsystems that generate cryptocurrencies and who don't. Taking for example the BOINC.Italy
community, as can be seen from the related discussion on their forum161, mostpart of the virtual community continues to process without Gridcoin and therefore
remaining on the mission of volunteering and tolerating the existence of cryptocurrency e
the presence of users in the team.
As previously illustrated, the Italian virtual community accepts donations
even via cryptocurrency, so admins and the community at large don't
they are against using cryptocurrencies regardless. Some users, especially thosewith dozens of CPUs, they see Gridcoin as a way to recoup expenses,
mostly for bills, or to reinvest what they earn in hardware
best to further increase the number of processed wu.

“So we as a community on Gridcoin have always been neutral. We are neither pro
nor against. Do you want to participate in Gridcoin? Free to do so, the hardware is yours. Do not
I can force you to nothing. However you're helping science, that's for sure. We
we prefer to do it another way. That is, we prefer to do it for free because
it's voluntary work, if you earn something afterwards and as many do that earning there
you reinvest it in hardware, because many play this game here: “the one I'll take laterwith gridcoin I'll get more hardware to score more points” and go scale with thecomputing power that you donate to projects is welcome. Absolutely, it is anyway
computing power that is given to scientific research. We stay out of it, that is
161 https://www.boincitaly.org/forum/segnalazioni-richieste-e-suggerimenti/114367-gridcoin.html site visited on 23/10/2022

78

Machine Translated by Google

we know it exists: we do not condemn it, we do not participate in it. Please donate. We
let's do it another way. That's why I said volunteering 2.0, because you
we give free.”- Conversational interview of 04/10/2022 with Stefano Bologna, director of
BOINC.Italy

Gridcoin does not negatively affect scientific research, indeed in some cases
stabilizes the supply of computing power by making BOINC more attractive to groups
research. The choice made by the Italian virtual community is based on ethical andcoherence i.e. if BOINC was born as a volunteer tool then it mustremain in the sphere of free activities carried out for the community.

4.4 Businesses as an actor in the BOINC network
Some enterprises participate in distributed computing by making BOINC available
computing power, for example through office PCs. It is not uncommon to find among theusers of a small, medium and large business project. Firms often add
to the user description a brief description of the company's activities and a link toreach the company website.
Multinationals have played a key role in the creation and management ofsome projects.

4.4.1 IBM e World Community Grid
Surely a successful case is that of IBM. The multinational launched World
Community Grid, or rather a project container, on November 16, 2004. World
Community Grid (WCG) is certainly the largest container of sub-projects of
distributed computing on BOINC. Between completed and active projects, WCG arrived at
support 31 distributed computing sub-projects.

79Machine Translated by Google

WCG is part of the “Social services” section of the broader “Citizenshipinitiatives” of IBM162. IBM promotes initiatives of this kind to give
boost to its image and to increase the stakeholders who gravitate towards itaround your network. WCG therefore falls within the concept of corporate social
responsibility163 .
IBM has included WCG in the 100 Icons of Progress, i.e. it is one of the 100 mostimpactful innovations by IBM on humanity164. On September 13, 2021 IBM hasannounced that WCG will be managed by the Krembil Research Institute and no longer
by the IT multinational165. Data migration started on February 28th
2022, while the management and recovery of project wu processing is stillin the recovery phase.

The news was partly greeted with some discontent by the volunteers166 .
IBM ensured a good progress of the project also thanks to the possibility, frompart of companies, foundations, associations and universities, to become a partner of IBM
as well as providing a lot of computing power itself.
IBM managed the partnerships through national foundations. For example in Italy
operated the IBM Italia Foundation. To become a partner you had to guarantee “a totalof 50 RTDs and the average contribution of 2 RTD's per day” where RTDs stands for Run
Time Days. Currently the Italian partners for WCG are 10: Associazione degli
Industrialists of Vicenza, ASPHI Foundation, Information Systems, Sodalitas,
MolecularLab, Immaginario Scientifico of Trieste, Department of Computer Science e
Telecommunications of the University of Trento, Department of Computer Science andSystems of the University of Pavia, ENI, Province of Agrigento167 .
The Krembil Research Institute would like to maintain IBM's guidelines for accepting
projects proposed by research groups168 .
162 https://www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/citizenship.shtml site visited on 10/24/2022
163 Hatch, Cunliffe, (2013), Theory of organization, p. 321 164
https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/ site visited 10/24/2022 165
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/article.s?articleId =732 site visited 10/24/2022 166
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/forums/wcg/viewthread_thread,43699_offset,0 site visited 10/24/2022 167
https://www.ibm.com/easytools /runtime/hspx/prod/public/X0027/PortalX/page/pageTemplate?
c=fd63fa97b39b4663afc96a18d1973435&s=3ee9674b01694bd4a6650354e3983eff site visited on 24/10/2022
168 https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/research/proposal.s site visited on 24/10/2022

80

Machine Translated by Google

A project, to be accepted:- must have benefits for humanity- it must be conducted by public bodies or non-profit organizations, therefore it must not generate
dividends- any data produced must be made public, accessible and free of charge
scientific community- the problem to be solved must be decomposable in wu and the elaborations mustbe such as to be able to satisfy the offer of computing power of the volunteers
Hard to predict how WCG will evolve in the future, currently transitioning
from IBM to the Krembil Research Institute seems very difficult.

“What I've noticed is that even World Community Grid doesn't have that many projects
lately, and this is perhaps not a good sign”- Conversational interview of 06/10/2022 with Valter Cavecchia, director of
Tn-Grid and Technical Collaborator of Research Bodies at CNR-IMEM, headquarters
Trent secondary school81

Machine Translated by Google

4.4.2 The scientific and social commitment of companies
Anderson has tried several times to involve private subjects in the platform
BOINC.
A very interesting example could be that of Suzuki, the famous company
Japanese car manufacturer.
Suzuki originally wanted to run BOINC on their cars, when
they were parked. The automaker had built a client on ARM and had
introduced a custom graphical interface. Unfortunately the project was abandoned
and today only a few photos of the prototype remain (Figure 17).
This is just one of many partnerships Anderson has tried to nurture over time169

Figure 17: Suzuki Car Demo - BOINC, 2019, David P. Anderson, source: https://continuumhypothesis.com/boinc_history.php#companies

169 https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php#companies site visited on 26/10/2022

82

Machine Translated by Google

BOINC would appear unattractive to businesses. There is no realpublic relations team, and this did not contribute to the knowledge ofplatform or build strong partnerships with businesses.
To make BOINC attractive to companies not strictly connected to the sector, yes
they should take targeted action.
Taking Treedom170 or 3Bee171 as an example, which are companies that sell
products but at the same time strongly sensitize people towards the issues
environmental, BOINC should make enterprises understand the importance of the impact ofscientific research on the community. Firms like Treedom and 3Bee have caught on
the attention also of big giants like Samsung, OVS, Ferrero etc. Businesses
who invest in activities with an impact on the community obtain, in return,prestige and the improvement of its image towards customers. Another great one
example is certainly the SpaceX company, which has managed to capture the interest ofmasses and to increase interest in scientific research in space. Knowledge
distributed computing platforms should also make use of testimonials e
ambassador.

170 https://business.treedom.net/it site visited on 26/10/2022
171 https://www.3bee.com/business site visited on 26/10/2022

83

Machine Translated by Google

The Vodafone Italia Foundation has shot a series of videos, called #PillowRecipes,
with well-known starred chef Bruno Barbieri (Figure 18) for their calculation project
distributed DreamLab172 indeed researchers at Imperial College were studying theantiviral properties of some ingredients (mainly fruit and vegetables). The chef
Barbieri, in the videos, briefly explains the use of DreamLab: while the user
sleeps, the smartphone processes calculations and hence the name "Pillow Recipes".
The videos totaled approximately 6,000 views. On 10/27/2020 they were67,421 registered users who actively support the Italian AIRC project“The Explorer

from thecells

cancerous

172 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XAzBk0a85c&t=2s site visited on 26/10/2022

84(Phase2)”.

Machine Translated by Google

BOINC could do similarly involving the likes of Neil Tyson,
famous science communicator, or Mark Hamill, a well-known American actor who has
played Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars saga (many projects are themed
astronomy).
The closure of the SETI@home project (analysis of data processed by volunteers isstill active) and the Arecibo radio telescope have had a strong impact on the minor
number of news circulating about BOINC, the SETI program itself had a strong
cultural impact over the last 20 years and in fact has been cited or included in numerous
science fiction works. The recent Covid-19 pandemic has certainly awakened
interest in the platform often putting the projects themselves in difficulty,
especially of the medical field, which could not meet the power supply of
calculation.

4.5 The opinion of the volunteers on the problems of BOINC
BOINC.Italy volunteers were asked what are the main problems of
BOINC with a multiple choice question (Graph 8).
57% of the sample answered that there is little publicity from institutions
public and private. Indeed BOINC should be a tool
widely used due to its simplicity and vision but they do exist
very little information and news online.
9.52% of the sample thinks that there is little involvement on the part of researchers
on forums, social networks, etc. Also in this case it was analyzed that in some cases i
researchers think that communication is superfluous as well as the management offorum e social.
9.52% of the sample think that the BOINC infrastructure is underdeveloped
compared to competitors (other voluntary distributed computing projects), while another
9.52% of the sample thinks that there are no problems related to BOINC.

85

Machine Translated by Google

3 users (respectively 4.76% of the sample) reported it as a problem
related to BOINC: the credit system, the use of BOINC to mine cryptocurrency andthe indifference of the people.

It was also asked, with an open-ended question, what characteristics
should be added to BOINC.
38% of the sample believes that BOINC has all the desired characteristics. The
remaining 62% of respondents sent a series of improvement proposals between
their very various:
86

Machine Translated by Google

creating a direct chat with project administrators, multiple projects onmobile devices and for GPUs, greater control over the processing in progress, more
efficiency in wu distribution, greater customization of settings
for wu processing, more attractive graphics for screensavers (someprojects show screensavers based on processing when the PC is not onuse), reward system (such as Gridcoin).

For the majority of volunteers there would therefore be room for improvement
BOINC, many of these improvements would also help make it more palatable
distributed computing.

87

Machine Translated by Google

Chapter 5 The future prospects of distributed computing
Anderson has been very critical of the future of BOINC in recent years.
First of all, he expected greater involvement on the part of the volunteers
public relations issue, but without a centralized structure hardly
it can have an impact on multinationals or towards public bodies. The goal was
make the BOINC Wiki the central element in transmitting guides and informationon the distributed computing platform, which has not happened173 .
According to Anderson, BOINC is unappealing to research groups because the power ofcalculation is not immediately available, in fact you have to involve a goodnumber of volunteers and they can always decide to eliminate their own
machines from the project therefore the computing power is not fixed but varies over time.
To overcome this problem was created Science United, in which the volunteer does notchooses the single project but can choose research areas (astronomy,
medicine etc.). This way there will always be computing power available for i
researchers174 .

As testified by the administrator of the Tn-Grid project, Valter Cavecchia, eby the administrator of BOINC.Italy, Stefano Bologna, the danger that the projects will nothave computing power is non-existent. Indeed, often some volunteers migrate toother platforms for lack of processing. Plus Gridcoin pools or projects
such as Charity Engine175 provide the necessary security for researchers to have aminimum amount of computing power always available over time.

5.1 Centralized supercomputing and BOINC: we still need the projectsof distributed computing? The EuroHPC caseIadvantagesof thecentralized

supercalcolo

An ordinary computer performs each task in series, then to start a task
173 https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php#volunteer site visited on 10/27/2022
174 https://scienceunited.org/su_about.php site visited on 27/10/2022
175 https://www.charityengine.com/marketplace/grants site visited on 27/10/2022

88

I am

remarkable.

Machine Translated by Google

must finish the previous one first, while hpc (high performance computing)allows you to solve complex problems using parallel processing176 .
The HPC allows to reduce the activity in the laboratory177, in fact the majority of the tests
they are not carried out physically but through simulations. The results more
promising, especially in the medium range, are finally tested in the laboratory.
If a state has data processing centers for scientific research, it shouldn't
depend on multinationals and/or other states. Obviously the data processing centersthey are in limited quantities so there are selection criteria for the proposals.
Let's take EuroHPC for example. It is a public-private partnership of the Union
which aims to “strengthen European excellence and industrial strength, asupport the digital transformation of its economy while ensuring its
technological sovereignty". The goal is to create an infrastructure made up of more
supercomputer to make the European Union independent in the field of power
computing and to increase the experience and skills of companies and researchers. THE
public participants are the European Union (represented by the Commission) andrelated Member States to which are added 3 other non-EU states, i.e. Iceland, Norway
and Turkey178 .
EuroHPC consists of 8 supercomputers: Lumi in Finland (375 PetaFLOPS),
Leonardo in Italy (249.47 PetaFLOPS), Marenostrum 5 in Spain (205 PetaFLOPS),
Vega in Slovenia (6,92 PetaFLOPS), Meluxina in Lussemburgo (12,81 PetaFLOPS),
Karolina in the Czech Republic 9.59 (PetaFLOPS), Discoverer in Bulgaria (4.51
PetaFLOPS) and Deucalion in Portugal (7.22 PetaFLOPS)179. The overall poweris 870.52 PetaFLOPS. If we considered it, a single supercomputer would occupy thesecond position in the top 500 supercomputers of June 2022180

176 https://www.ibm.com/it-it/topics/hpc site visited on 10/29/2022
177 https://www.oracle.com/it/cloud/hpc/what-is-hpc/ site visited 29/10/2022
178 https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu/about/discover-eurohpc-ju_en#benefits-of-supercomputing website visited 29/10/2022
179 https://eurohpc-ju. europa.eu/about/our-supercomputers_en site visited on 29/10/2022
180 https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/list/2022/06/ site visited on 29/10/2022

89.

Machine Translated by Google

Since the computing power is limited, the time allocation is based on aselection of proposals. There are 9 steps to evaluate the proposals.
A first check is the administrative one, the Peer-Review office examines the online registration and
the Project Scope and Plan document181 which describes theresearch, the subjects involved, the scientific importance of the proposal, the quality of theverification and validation of simulations and predictions, the software used, therelated libraries etc.. In the second phase the technical feasibility of the

proposals that can be technically accepted, accepted with reserve or rejected(in the event of a rejected proposal, the evaluation will still proceed). In the third stage
the proposals are sorted, based on the research topic, to the Domain Panels; the Domain
Panel Chair assigns a proposal to two panellists, who evaluate the proposal
proposal based on 3 criteria: Excellence, Innovation and Impact, Quality and Efficiencyof the implementation. In the fourth stage each Domain Panel assigns separately
a score after which a first classification is formed and they come
Identify resource recommendations for each proposal. In the fifth stage theproposals are not discussed on the basis of membership in a Domain Panel but cometreated all together; in the super panel meeting a ranking is created and theresource recommendations for each proposal. In the sixth stage the potency of
calculation is allocated according to the ranking and according to the recommendations, in case of
running out of resources some proposals are rejected. In the seventh stage
the list of accepted proposals is sent to the EuroHPC Board of Directors which approves themcomputing power allocations. In the eighth phase the Peer-Review office communicates,by email, the results which are also viewable in the related peer platform
reviews. In the ninth and final phase, the proposing body accepts the assigned resources and thehost bodies provide access to the resources182 .
The allocation lasts 1 year and is renewable for a further year183. Between theregistration of the proposal and communication of the allocation of resources
181 Copy of the Project Scope and Plan
document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x5xhsy4ecF6UdBJUJE0qfpKA49e785NebJgnf_V8Mng/edit?
usp=share_link 182 https://prace-ri.eu/hpc-access/eurohpc-access/eurohpc -ju-regular-access-mode/regular-access-applicant-information/ site visitedon 29/10/2022 183 https://prace-ri.eu/call/eurohpc-ju-call-for-proposals-for- regular-access-mode-2022-11-04-cutoff/ site visited on 10/30/2022

90

Machine Translated by Google

about 3 months pass and a certain amount of produce has to be produced
documentation. Based on the final classification, it is not said that there is enoughcomputing power for all proposals. The demand for computing power can bedone only if the project requires at least 10 million CPU hours or 1 million GPU hours184 .
This excludes PhD projects or otherwise
short-term projects. EuroHPC, therefore, does not exclude the possibility on the part of theresearch institutions to use distributed computing voluntary, indeed we can say that
EuroHPC satisfies the demand for medium-term computing power (minimum 1
year, maximum 2 years) while distributed computing platforms, in particular
BOINC, meet a little all the needs in particular the demand for power
short and very short term as well as long term calculation. I asked
to the Tn-Grid administrator his point of view on these supercomputer networks, indetail of EuroHPC and the future of BOINC:Interviewer: These supercomputer networks […] can overshadow thevoluntary distributed computing?

So in my opinion not, at the moment when these things are paid for. For
access these resources here however you have to pay, you pay informally in thesense that you have to win projects, but in the end you pay money, however they areof resources. The good I see in this kind of approach is to go out, try to
get out of the point of view of scientific research from the usual ... from the monopoly thatthey have cloud services from Amazon, Google etc and Microsoft. […] But having a
hat European who do not have a monopoly of these large companies second
it's good to me. On the issue of distributed computing, in my opinion it must serve as it isborn at the beginning [...] I what I say, you start with an innovative idea [...] that for
obvious reasons no one finances it […] you start with a BOINC system, after a while
you have enough tools if it's a scientific thing, I'm not talking about a thinginteresting but pseudo scientific, in a good way like looking for prime numbers
bigger and bigger or try to prove the Collatz conjecture, are things that
184 https://prace-ri.eu/call/eurohpc-ju-call-for-proposals-for-regular-access-mode-2022-11-04-cutoff/ site visited on 01/11/2022

91…

Machine Translated by Google

After n years, after a few years, you have the publication mechanism, you have a
feedback if your work makes sense or no longer makes sense. At that point BOINC
there shouldn't be anymore [… ] If (ed the project) works it should be
fundedcome onchannels

officersOffinancing.

- Conversational interview of 06/10/2022 with Valter Cavecchia, director of
Tn-Grid and Technical Collaborator of Research Bodies at CNR-IMEM, headquarters
secondary

Trent

Of

BOINC therefore could be an excellent "incubator of ideas" not dissimilar, at least
on a conceptual level, from university spin-offs. The project was born on BOINC and after
1 or 2 years is evaluated based on what it has produced in terms of data andscientific publications. If the project has some impact then it should be
financed by the domestic state.

5.2 Ibercivis and World Community Grid as models for a project
European or Italian multidisciplinary
Ibercivis is a Spanish container project (also called multidisciplinary project).
It was born from the Zivis pilot project of the University of Zaragoza. Ibercivis was born
officially on 20 June 2008 again as a project of the University of Zaragoza
but other scientific bodies are also involved: the Institute of Biocomputation andPhysics of Complex Systems (BIFI) also from the same Spanish university, the Centroof Energy, Environmental and Technological Research (CIEMAT), il
Extremadura Center for Advanced Technologies (CETA-Ciemat), the Superior Council of
Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC, similar to the CNR) and the RedIRIS (public body, is a
network of research centers and universities)185. 13 sub-projects have produced
scientific publications186 in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine and
185 https://web.archive.org/web/20210727221833/https://ibercivis.es/about-the-ibercivis-foundation/?lang=en site visited on 01/11/2022
186 BOINC publications list https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/124JZfQMU1CEbJxceP-5c2sq8S6kx3TftZGll91oSxqk/edit?
usp=share_link

92Machine Translated by Google

of social sciences involving not only Spanish but also Portuguese universities
and of Latin America. Ibercivis is managed by 13 experts including five figures
who deal with project management, one person deals with the drafting ofEuropean proposals, a computer scientist, an expert in communication and a sociologist187.
The Ibercivis foundation actively promotes non-citizen science
only through BOINC projects but also with other projects and initiatives. There
Ibercivis platform currently does not host active sub-projects but that is enoughnormal being a very discontinuous platform in wu production.
We can compare, at least on a conceptual level, the waves of Ibercivis projects to the runsof CERN188 or to moments of pause between projects to improve and/or
renew the team, introduce new projects, improve the code, etc. Ibercivis isvery active on social networks: the YouTube channel has 52,332 total views and 360

registered189, the Instagram page has 673 followers190, the Facebook page has 1893
"Likes"191 and the Twitter page is followed by 4210 followers192 .
Surely Ibercivis can be a good example of a European project
volunteering on BOINC also having a large communication team. The projects
they are proposed by Iberian or Latin American bodies and universities, but they do not exist
information on the site regarding the project selection criteria. We canbut assume that any college project is actually goodfrom a scientific research point of view then controls for selection
they should be minimal; selection criteria exist for contexts such as those of
EuroHPC where resources (computing power) are limited. A project-container
European could therefore replicate the structure of Ibercivis with some selection criteria
minimums similar to those of WCG (criteria listed in paragraph 4.4.1 IBM and World
Community Grid).A possible European project, as previously described,
it would not conflict with EuroHPC but would rather act as an incubator and network
187 https://ibercivis.es/el-equipo-de-ibercivis/ site visited on 02/11/2022
188 https://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch/schedule/LHC-long-term.htm site visited on 02/11/2022
189 https://www.youtube.com/c/IbercivisCiencia/about website visited on
02/11/2022 190 https://www.instagram.com/ibercivis/ website visitedon 02/11 /2022 191 https://www.facebook.com/Ibercivis/ site visitedon 02/11/2022 192 https://twitter.com/ibercivis site visited on 02/11/2022

93

Machine Translated by Google

of supercomputers of the European Union by accelerator, the computing project
European distributed could also be independent and parallel with respect toEuro HPC. This way researchers could always have computing power
available, which would not be dispersed in micro-projects, while volunteers could
always meet the demand for computing power and could choose the below
projects like in WCG (Figure 19) where volunteers can choose to select
only some projects or can choose to receive wu of non projects as wellselected if there is no wu for previously selected projects193. A possible
European (or national) project would increase cooperation between departments by one
same university (Tn-Grid with the University of Trento is an excellent example).

193 https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ms/viewMyProjects.do site visited on 02/11/2022

94

Machine Translated by Google

5.3 The role of public institutions in distributed computing according to BOINC.Italy
volunteers
The BOINC.Italy volunteers were asked, with an open-ended question, howpublic institutions (also from the European Union) could be involved in the
distributed computing. The volunteers responded with a series of reflections. A
voluntary offers tax breaks for those who buy hardware for reasons ofvolunteer work or for electricity bills. 4 volunteers would like schools anduniversities were involved first:“Stimulating, especially in high school/ university, the concept of "citizen
science" and that everyone can contribute, in their own small way, to scientific research."-Volunteern.

4“I believe that everything should start from the schools. Maybe not from the primary, but fromsecondary teachers could talk about the distributed computing system and,95

Machine Translated by Google

addressing certain topics of the study program, they could leadattention to projects with some affinity. Ways to get kids involved aremany (create groups ofclass, take part in challenges, etc.)”- Volunteer n. 3

A volunteer offers ad hoc scholarships for those undertaking studies related to
distributed computing. Another volunteer proposes, however, the creation of one
European platform:“By creating a multidisciplinary Boinc project and "incubator" in which to bring together pro
minorsjets

Ofuniversity

It isinstitutes

European“- Volunteer n. 9

There are those who want to integrate distributed computing with the green economy by lengthening the cycle

vital of tablets and smartphones:“A collection body for old smartphones, compatible with
the Boinc platform, which would be reused to increase the size of the
Of

grill

calculation"- Volunteer n. 13

Another 4 volunteers suggest an enhancement of communication to let
let citizens know about distributed computing platforms:“Ordinary people should be sensitized more than anything else. Everything else will come by itself. There

BOINC platform and other types of science sharing platform is aenvironment

Of

niche

known

bit

- Volunteer n. 7

96

at

lot

“

Machine Translated by Google

Two volunteers propose installing BOINC on public PCs
Administration.
3 volunteers, on the other hand, are skeptical about the involvement of institutions
national or European:“Public institutions must support research with funding. No
research center can think of using only and exclusively the calculation
distributed

Of

BOINC.”- Volunteer n. 20

85.71% of the sample is in favor of involving the entities (at various levels).
public while 14.29% of the sample is against the involvement ofinstitutions in distributed computing. Volunteers expect more fundingof citizen science projects and greater publicity of citizen science initiatives
this type.

5.4 Unused computing power: the example of the secondary school
degree in Italy
BOINC can be installed on various electronic devices and on various operating
systems (Windows, MacOS, Linux)194. In general, PCs almost never use al
100% their computing power, in most cases PCs are needed
mainly for surfing the internet and that involves 10% usage up to a
maximum of 30% CPU. So essentially today we buy pc of which not
we use 75% of the computing power. Schools could be a place
perfect for awareness of distributed computing and citizen science. THE
BOINC projects are often the subject of the subjects studied in school especially in thesecondary school programs. Wanting to take an example

194 https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/System_requirements site visited on 03/11/2022

97Machine Translated by Google

precisely the latter, how much computing power institutions are not using
public? Most of the educational establishments have adopted the electronic registerso each class has at least 1 computer. Taking into consideration of the pcs of
low-end (less than 500 euros) we can hypothesize the use, as CPU, of Core i3 (Intel) or Ryzen 3(AMD)195. Assume the use of Core i3 processor with 4 cores,
we have a base frequency (considering the CPU with the lowest frequency) of 2.30 GHz196. In Italy
there are 124,552 classes for the academic year 2022/2023197,

therefore we can hypothesize the presence of 124,552 electronic registers and therefore ofas many computers physically present in the classrooms (I exclude the classrooms from this calculation
computers and PCs used for administrative purposes). We have, theoretically, alayout 124,552 x 4 = 498,208 processors. Let's assume a use of BOINC al
50% (249,104 processors) we can calculate the FLOPS:
Nop x fclock x Ncore= 2.3GHz x 16 x 249,104 = 9,167,027.2 GigaFLOPS or 91.67
PetaFLOPS
You would basically have a small supercomputer that you could run intoless than 30 minutes. If we think of all the public bodies and related offices (municipalities,
Provinces, Regions, Universities, Ministries, schools of all levels, etc.) we caneasily guess that we have a gigantic supercomputer, not used, but
located throughout the Italian peninsula.

195 Example of an agreement for the supply of PCs (lot 1) https://www.acquistinretepa.it/opencms/opencms/scheda_iniziative.html?
idIniziativa=f6ac8fc1b4c73b46 site visited on 03/11/2022
196 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/it/it/ark/products/series/195733/10th-generation-intel-core-i3-processors.html site visited on 03/11/2022
197 Miur , (2022), Focus "Main school data - Start of the 2022/2023 school year", p. 898

Machine Translated by Google

Conclusions
The concept of citizen science has been proposed through the Computing Platform
distributed BOINC, briefly retracing the birth and structure of theplatform and analyzing the scientific production in 20 years of activity. In timecomplex virtual communities have arisen around BOINC, these groups haveincreased the general engagement of the platform also through the use of thegamification. Among the various communities one of the most active is certainly the community
Italian BOINC.Italy, which was administered a questionnaire to identify the
motivations of volunteering 2.0 and the users' relationship with the ei platform
researchers. Even the Italian academic world has participated, with some projects, in
BOINC; there are factors that have influenced the use of BOINC in Italy. Therecommunication between volunteers and researchers is essential to establish a relationshipmutual trust. Businesses have also played an important role in the network
BOINC by donating computing power or creating projects for the platform. The
future perspectives of distributed computing are varied and there are different paths
applicable both at national and European level. On that basis I think it wasdemonstrated how the BOINC platform can be a great tool foralternative scientific production (at least 994 scientific publications in 20 years).
to paid data processing services. Around the platform were born somevery complex virtual communities which, through their activities, increased
the efficiency and effectiveness of scientific research. Although the platform has only one
tool for the aggregation of users, teams, the latter have formed gods
complex and more or less informal groups that had not been imaginedin the design of the platform. Volunteers are not mere users of researchscience as a public good but they are an active part in providing this good tocommunity. Furthermore, I believe it is demonstrated as a national project-containeror European is easily implemented compared to the in-house construction of one
supercomputers. Citizens become, with citizen science projects, an extension

99

Machine Translated by Google

of research institutions. If we think of the participation of BOINC.Italy members in the
researchers night 2019, let's see how the end user, the citizen, is the same asprovides information about research activities to other citizens. Over the years it isan osmotic exchange of ideas was established between citizens and researchers. BOINC has
knocked down the classic communication barriers between researchers and citizens by making idaily relationships, and not occasional, and minimizing the distance between citizens and institutions ofresearch.

100

Machine Translated by Google

101

Machine Translated by Google

Bibliography- Besanko D., Dranove, D, Shanley M., Schaefer S., (2017), Economia dell'industria
and business strategies, isedi, Milan- Corbetta P., (2020), Social research: methodology and techniques. The paradigms ofreference, Il Mulino, Bologna- David P. Anderson, (2019), BOINC: A Platform for Volunteer Computin, Journal ofGrid Computing,- de Vita P., Mercurio R., Testa F., (2007), Business organization: structure andrelationship mechanisms, G. Giappichelli Editore, Turin- Hatch Jo M., Cunliffe L. Ann, (2013), Organization theory, Il Mulino,
Bologna- Massimo Florio, (2019), Investing in Science, The MIT Press, London, England- Miur, (2022), Focus "Main school data - Start of the school year
2022/2023”
https://miur.gov.it/documents/20182/6891182/Principali+dati+della+scuola++Focus+start+school+year+2022-2023.pdf/cb3b168f-fb9e-a359-85ff
2f7b8964098d?version=1.0&t=1663851622661- Pierangelo Crucitti, (2016), Citizen Science. Participatory science.
Principles, examples and perspectives of a constantly growing phenomenon, Science and researchhttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/321850316_Citizen_Science_Fare_scienza_
in_a_participatory_way_Principles_examples_and_prospects_of_a_growing_phenomenon_
constant- University of California, (2022), License Agreement, University of California,
Berkeley
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tEF1IAcIJH7AUdITCDc24dEezJt7ASBjceM
W2p1C6iU/edit?usp=sharing

102

Machine Translated by Google

Sitography- https://obsproject.com- https://meet.google.com- https://it.libreoffice.org- https://www.google.com- https://earthwatch.org/expeditions/unearthing-ancient-history-in-tuscany- https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcolo_distribuito#:~:text=Il%20calcolo%20distributed%20is%20a,system%20distributed%20is%20said%20program- https://www.anandtech.com/show/- https://www.hwupgrade.it/news- https://www.top500.org/lists/top500/2022/06/- https://it.wikipedia.org- http://www.programmiamo.altervista.org/hwsw/hwsw11.html https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php- https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/How_BOINC_works https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Account_managers https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Computation_credit- https://boinc.berkeley.edu/boinc_papers/credit/text.php- https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/- https://einsteinathome.org/it-it/application-source-code-and-license- https://wiki.ligo.org/Computing/LALSuite https://einsteinathome.org/it-it/application-source-code-and-license- https://boinc.berkeley.edu/info.php- https://einsteinathome.org/it-it/privacy- https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/124JZfQMU1CEbJxceP
5c2sq8S6kx3TftZGll91oSxqk/edit? usp=sharing- https://www.nsf.gov/about/- https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta- https://www.rechenkraft.net/wiki/Willkommen_beim_Verein_Rechenkraft.net_e.V.
- https://www.rechenkraft.net- https://www.rechenkraft.net/forum/ https://www.setiusa.us/forum.php- https://www.boincgames.com

103

Machine Translated by Google- https://www.boinc-af.org- https://www.boincitaly.org/forum.html https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org https://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/start.php https://www.boinc-af.org https://wcg.fandom.com/wiki/World_Community_Grid_Wiki https://explore.transifex.com https://www.youtube.com https://www.facebook.com https://web.archive.org- https://setiathome.berkeley.edu- https://gene.disi.unitn.it- https://one.google.com- https://offerta-internet.it/- https://www.payscale.com- https://aws.amazon.com- https://gridcoin.us- https://crypto.com- https://www.ibm.com- https://business.treedom.net/
it - https://www.3bee.com- https://scienceunited.org- https://www.oracle.com- https://eurohpc-ju.europa.eu- https://prace-ri.eu- https://ibercivis.es- https://www.instagram.com- https://lhc-commissioning.web.cern.ch- https://twitter.com- https://www.acquistinretepa.it/- https://ark.intel.com

104

Machine Translated by Google

Text files, video and audio files, data and processing- License Agreement, Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing(BOINC):
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tEF1IAcIJH7AUdITCDc24dEezJt7ASBjceM
W2p1C6iU/edit?usp=sharing- BOINC scientific production list (scientific articles) https://
docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/124JZfQMU1CEbJxceP
5c2sq8S6kx3TftZGll91oSxqk/edit?usp=sharing- Questionnaire for the BOINC.Italy team and data processing
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xschMGjrJog7I4kFZeGvwro4vgfKAxc
L5ykhFM5fAo/edit?usp=sharing- Talk and email interviews https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QQuGK7dIe8aEI9Dg9uBIPz3aWqGcsvru?
usp=sharing- Project Scope and Plan document (EuroHPC)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x5xhsy4ecF6UdBJUJE0qfpKA49e785NebJgnf_V8Mng/edit?usp=share_link

105