The situation is a bit different today. Back when Bionic and Set@home were more common the CPUs used more or less the same power whether they were idle or in full use. Nowadays however running something like this will run up considerable extra power usage and is no longer "free".
Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
51–60 of 90 posts
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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@home started a long long time ago, when computer used the same amount of power, if they worked hard or if the computer was idle. That's why they started as screensaver, it did just not matter.
Yes, I remember. But even then we knew full well the chance of identifying anything via SETI was minute. We were looking at a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of what's out there.
A tiny office full of grad students could have come up with a dozen more useful ways to use that many distributed computing cycles, say for medical research. Not only folding@home: imagine what a Wolfram or a Knuth would have achieved with all those cycles.
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
not all (or even most) of them are profit ventures, like at all. There are some along those lines. I do Asteroids at home, they need help figuring out the shape and size of asteroids. The data is published for public use.
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#54Anyone interested should also look into Gridcoin, you can get some crypto back in addition to doing some good science. https://gridcoin.us/
For a non-crypto alternative, check out Distributive DCP [1]. You deploy compute workloads which are executed in secure wasm sandboxes (even in your browser [2]). People computing get paid to compute other people's workloads.
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Electronics do not move the needle at all when it comes to climate impact (in terms of heat dissipation). It's where the electricity is sourced that's the problem.
I think everyone understands it to mean that
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#56Nice - 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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DreamLab
TIL. I wonder how they've solved the "don't kill my app" problem, to prevent the cpu getting clocked down to 200 MHz while the screen is off. And not being available to techies on f-droid or website download (needing to find a way to get it from Google Play servers) is a bit of a missed opportunity.
Edit: checking it out, it apparently comes with facebook analytics and other goodies: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/416699/ — this is why I hate dealing with the crap you find on alt stores like this "play" thing. Wouldn't have that if it just came in the official f-droid store! Anyway, I like its mission and it's a long-running project, released back in 2015. Cool stuff. Wonder how much compute power they get out of it, the website nor Wikipedia disclose that
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seti@home started a long long time ago, when computer used the same amount of power, if they worked hard or if the computer was idle. That's why they started as screensaver, it did just not matter.
Yes, I remember. But even then we knew full well the chance of identifying anything via SETI was minute. We were looking at a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of what's out there. A tiny office full of grad students could have come up with a dozen more useful ways to use that many distributed computing cycles, say for medical research. Not only folding@home: imagine what a Wolfram or a Knuth would have achieved with al…
I suspect the useful things you can do with this model are quite limited. You need:
* A problem that can be cut into chunks small enough for a low end desktop computer
* One that's solvable without communicating with anything else
* The chunk is solvable enough that the user doesn't interrupt the process
* And the bandwidth usage is small
* And the solution is easily verifiable
* And the problem is big enough that it needs a vast amount of hardware to solve
* But is relatively unimportant, so nobody wants to spend any money to solve it faster
Especially the latter parts seem to mostly suggest quirky uses like SETI. If it's something important you can probably do it faster by just finding funding, than by trying to convince millions of people to install a screensaver.
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#58Is there any success stories out of this program?
Yes
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#59Distributive DCP lets you compute other people's distributed research/workloads and get paid for it (no crypto involved).
Compute workloads get run in secure js/wasm compute nodes (which could be your browser, or a screensaver, etc). For instance, my friend built a Blender cycles renderer using it
It's cool tech continuing the awesome legacy of BOINC! I work at Distributive, AMA if you're curious
Re: Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer
#60Distributive DCP lets you compute other people's distributed research/workloads and get paid for it (no crypto involved). Compute workloads get run in secure js/wasm compute nodes (which could be your browser, or a screensaver, etc). For instance, my friend built a Blender cycles renderer using it It's cool tech continuing the awesome legacy of BOINC! I work at Distributive, AMA if you're curious
Very cool. Link?