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Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#22Old desktops with Boinc running 24/7 make an useful alternative to direct electric heating. Of course a heat pump is more efficient, but not everyone has that.
How efficient is Boinc as a heating application? It's an important part of calcuating its climate impact.
Also, why old desktops only? Won't a brand new desktop running at 100% generate plenty of heat? Isn't the difference merely calculations per W?
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#23Boinc on old hardware will win you quite the electric bill. Are they sharing the profits from these discoveries with the contributors? No of course not, that's their IP. You let them use your hardware, pay for the power and bandwidth and they run laughing to the bank. "Boinc - Free supercomputing from the stupid"
Yeah!! My one worthwhile box consumes 300 watts, and I made the mistake of folding covid-19 proteins for Boinc in the summer of '19. It was like a sauna in my office and the bill was eye-watering. Never again...
Summer of '19 is impressively early to be working on COVID-19 research.
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#24The SETI@Home screensaver [0] (the predecessor to BOINC) was the peak of nerd-cool when I was 11 or 12 years old. I had no idea what any of the graphs meant, and still don't, but I knew that I could help find _aliens_, and look like a hacker doing it [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home?useskin=vector#/medi...
> Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time What a waste of computing time!
SETI wasn't a waste of time don't have any good alternatives to it. Folding@home on the other hand probably could have been a lot more useful if they were training transformers on their results instead of just doing pure protein dynamics simulations.
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#25World Community Grid uses BOINC, and is back up and running after finding a new home.
https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/
I set it to run on a few cores of all my different machines. Keep it below 50% of the true core count, and the fan and heat increase is negligible, and science still gets done at a good rate. I've been a happy participant for years, and am glad they're still around, contributing to our mutual net benefit.
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#26Boinc on old hardware will win you quite the electric bill. Are they sharing the profits from these discoveries with the contributors? No of course not, that's their IP. You let them use your hardware, pay for the power and bandwidth and they run laughing to the bank. "Boinc - Free supercomputing from the stupid"
Don't talk it down just because you don't like it and you are cheap I did Rosetta for years and I was fully aware what and why I was supporting it...
Look if they want funding for their for profit venture they should just ask for your credit card number then go spend on AWS where the hardware is modern and the energy is efficiently used. But if they were upfront and asked directly for peoples hard earned money in exchange for nothing every sane human would say no, so there's this racket called boinc where they trick you into giving them your money indirectly and they laugh at you. You get a gold star if they find something with your "contribution". But they get a billion dollars for finding the next lucrative drug
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#27Nice - loved a bit of Boinc at one point.
I have Vodafone DreamLab installed on my iPhone and set it each night to compute whilst charging. Nice to be able to utilise the phone for some good whilst I am asleep.
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#28Boinc on old hardware will win you quite the electric bill. Are they sharing the profits from these discoveries with the contributors? No of course not, that's their IP. You let them use your hardware, pay for the power and bandwidth and they run laughing to the bank. "Boinc - Free supercomputing from the stupid"
Price doesn't matter if you were going to use that electricity for heating anyway. Mostly the project are run by universities funded by tax payers, and don't exist to make any profit. Ever heard of charity?
Heat pumps would be more efficient than resistive heating in silicon circuits.
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#29Is there any success stories out of this program?
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah!! My one worthwhile box consumes 300 watts, and I made the mistake of folding covid-19 proteins for Boinc in the summer of '19. It was like a sauna in my office and the bill was eye-watering. Never again...
Summer of '19 is impressively early to be working on COVID-19 research.
It was bioweapons design research /s