---
title: "Ibercivis"
chunk: 1/2
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibercivis"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:12:13.078637+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Ibercivis was a volunteer computing platform which allows internet users to participate in scientific research by donating unused computer cycles to run scientific simulations and other tasks. The original project, which became operational in 2008, was a scientific collaboration between the Portuguese and Spanish governments, but it is open to the general public and scientific community, both within and beyond the Iberian Peninsula. The project's name is a portmanteau of Iberia and the Latin word civis, meaning 'citizen'.
In April 2020, the volunteer computing platform was restarted by the Ibercivis Foundation and the Spanish National Research Council in order to screen existing drugs for antiviral activity against Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the causative agent of the COVID-19 pandemic.

== History ==
Ibercivis was developed in Spain with the cooperation of the Institute of Biocomputation and Physics of Complex Systems at the University of Zaragoza, CIEMAT, CETA-CIEMAT, the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and RedIris. The project tasks are issued by different scientific and technological centers in Spain with the aim of creating a functional platform for volunteer-based scientific computing. The project is a European counterpart to the successful United States-based SETI@home and Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) volunteer computing projects.
Ibercivis' predecessor, the University of Zaragoza-based volunteer computing project Zivis, began operation in 2007, and Ibercivis itself started operating in June 2008. The Zivis project was a local volunteer computing application funded by the ayuntamiento (city council) of the city of Zaragoza. The larger-scale Ibercivis infrastructure has been used for a variety of calculating applications, including nuclear fusion research, protein folding and materials simulations. In July 2009, the Ibercivis platform was extended to Portugal following an agreement signed by the governments of both countries during the Luso-Spanish Summit held in Zamora, Spain, in January 2009. Several Portuguese institutions subsequently affiliated themselves with Ibercivis, including the Ministry of Science, the Centre for Neuroscience and Cell Biology at the University of Coimbra, and the LIP experimental high-energy physics laboratory.
In April 2020, a new Ibercivis project was launched to support researchers efforts to fight Coronavirus disease 2019.

=== Number of participants ===
At its inception in June 2008, Ibercivis had 3,000 registered users hosting its various projects. By December 2012, this figure had risen to over 19,800, distributed across 124 countries. There were around 55,000 individual hosting devices registered with the project, of which over 3,600 were active on a weekly basis.
As of April 2020, there were 917 active users and 2375 active hosts in the new inception of Ibercivis.

== Projects ==
Ibercivis was intended to run indefinitely, and is designed to run several simultaneous applications belonging to different scientific disciplines in a manner similar to World Community Grid. Users can select which projects they wish to contribute to via the project's website. As of May 2020, Ibercivis encompassed eight different active projects:

=== Active Projects ===
COVID-Phym:  Screen existing drugs for antiviral activity against Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the causative agent of the COVID-19 pandemic.

=== Completed projects ===
Ibercivis projects that have been completed or discontinued as of May 2020 include: