DockerCon EU 2015

Cosmology@Home is a project which uses volunteer computing to analyze cosmological data and answer questions about our universe such as "how much dark matter is there?" and "under what conditions did the Big Bang occur?" We recently began using Docker by taking each job which we would normally send to our volunteer computers, and packaging it up inside a Docker container. The volunteer computers themselves come from interested users all over the world who download and run the software allowing them to become volunteers (called BOINC). The system is working exceedingly well and using Docker has made it massively easier for us to develop and run it. I will explain some of the technical details of the implementation, which involves a customized boot2docker ISO, as well give a brief summary of the scientific questions we are trying to answer and how these results made possible by Docker are helping analyze data from, e.g. the European Space Agency's Planck satellite.