ALICE Connex: A volunteer computing platform for the Time-Of-Flight calibration of the ALICE experiment. An opportunistic use of CPU cycles on Android devices

In this paper, we propose ALICE Connex, a prototype of a volunteer mobile computing platform for the ALICE experiment. The platform adopts the ‘‘volunteer computing’’ concept on mobile devices. Untapped computing power of smartphones can be aggregated and exploited to help in the calibration of the ALICE’s Time-of-Flight (TOF) particle detector. ALICE Connex is built based on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing or BOINC, which is a well-known volunteer computing middleware. In addition, ALICE Connex will offer an outreach service to connect the ALICE experiment to the general public by a way of edutainment and volunteer computing allowing them to be a part of the big experiments at CERN.