What is BOINC?
BOINC is an open-source volunteer oriented distributed computing grid. It's free, and harnesses the unused clock cycles from processors and graphics cards to attempt to cure cancer/aids/ebola/malaria, map the milkyway, fold proteins, search for extraterrestrial life, etc.
Currently, there are approx 250-580K active BOINC users & more than 4 million registered accounts. There's serious computing power within the BOINC community & the vast majority goes unpaid.
What are some examples of existing BOINC projects?
- World Community Grid : Attempting to solve Cancer, Ebola, Malaria, Zika, etc.
- SETI@Home : Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
- Milkyway@home : Creation of a 3d map of the milkyway galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.
Examples of more whitelisted projects.
How does Gridcoin benefit BOINC?
The Gridcoin network rewards BOINC volunteers on behalf of the whitelisted BOINC projects. As a result, more computation is pointed towards their projects without costing the BOINC project owners a penny.
By comparison, a BOINC project admin would have to fork out serious cash to get an equal level of computing power out of Maidsafe/Golem/etc. These platforms also limited in their possible types of computation, through BOINC you can distribute any kind of distributed computing application.
Who can make a BOINC project?
Anyone can create a BOINC project, there's no centralized authority in charge of the creation of BOINC projects.
How can I make a BOINC project?
One of the easiest method of creating a BOINC project is to use the 'BOINC Server Docker' repo!
The developer "Marius Millea" (Cosmology@Home dev) is very active, give him a shout if you run into issues w/ the docker container.
Outdated guides
- 'Creating BOINC projects (PDF)'
- 'Project creation cookbook'
- 'Building BOINC and BOINC applications on linux'
There are three types of BOINC projects!
Volunteer/non-profit
- Scientists: Use BOINC to create a volunteer computing project.
- Universities: Use BOINC to create a Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center.
The majority of BOINC projects are volunteer/non-profit based projects.
Commercial/For-Profit
- Companies: Use BOINC for desktop Grid computing.
Create a commercial BOINC project, charge customer to process their data and distribute x% to BOINC crunchers & y% to project admins/shareholders.
BOINC DAC (Theoretical)
A "BOINC decentralized autonomous company" is a theoretical extension on the 'Commercial/For-Profit' project type which operates in a P2P/Decentralized manner.
Further research&development is required to decentralize the BOINC web server stack.
Existing research (mostly storage decentralization, not 100% decentralized)
- Optimizing the data distribution layer of BOINC with BitTorrent.
- Attic: A Case Study for Distributing Data in BOINC Projects.
- Extending the BOINC architecture using peer-to-peer application code exchange.
BOINC vs Commercial Cloud Computing
Research papers
- The cost of virtualization implementation in volunteer computing
- Increasing GP Computing Power for Free via Desktop GRID Computing and Virtualization
- [PDF] Cost-Benefit Analysis of Cloud Computing versus Desktop Grids
Research TL;DR: (Note - 7 year old statistics!)
- In the best-case scenario, hosts register at a rate of 124 cloud nodes per day.
- The ratio of volunteer nodes needed to achieve the compute power of a small EC2 instance is about 2.83 active volunteer hosts to 1.
- Effectively, with a commercial BOINC project, there exists the opportunity to create a cloud computing service without actually owning/providing the computing capabilities yourself. Imagine creating Azure at a fraction of the cost..
Got an idea for a BOINC project?
Do you have an idea for a potential BOINC project, or do you have questions about either BOINC or Gridcoin? Reply below!
By posting an idea to this thread, you agree to open sourcing of your post under the MIT license within the BOINC brainstorming thread repo to preserve the idea between brainstorming threads.
Why is this thread being reposted?
Due to complexities in Steemit's reward mechanism, there is a 30 day maximum window for replying to threads. After 30 days have passed, the thread is effectively archived/dead.
In order to continuously brainstorm possible BOINC projects this thread will be reposted every 30 days.
Past threads
I spoke about the following ideas during BeyondBitcoin episode 200, give it a listen if you're interested! RSVP thread Raw recording
Potential BOINC project for Bitshares
Bitshares Testnet Load Generator!
It was mentioned in the latest Bitshares hangout that the Bitshares testnet stress test may have been limited due to a lack of resources available for creating a larger transaction volume - what about creating a BOINC project to distribute this software out to a few thousand computers around the world?
Such a project would be unlikely rewarded by Gridcoin due to the bursty nature of stress testing, unfortunately. You could distribute an UIA to your volunteers by adding a Bitshares field to their account profile.
The 3000+ TX/s rate achieved in the recent Bitshares testnet stress-test was great, but let's try to push it to 3 million per second!
Relevant links:
Bitshares testnet stress-test thread
Bitshares fullnode distribution
Alongside the testnet load generator, you could distribute full node servers out to volunteers to supply additional network resources to the Bitshares network. This would require a proof of bandwidth credit mechanism to be created.
GRC is such a wholesome crypto. Love it.
Glad to hear :)
I spoke about the following ideas during BeyondBitcoin episode 200, give it a listen if you're interested! RSVP thread. Raw recording
BeyondBitcoin audio transcription!
Google charges $0.006 per 15secs ($260 for 3hrs audio), could an open source alternative to Google cloud API prove cheaper & perhaps able to undercut Google?
Possible (FOSS) software: CMU Sphinx, Kaldi, Julius, VoxForge.
Alternatively to an automated audio transcription mechanism, you could implement a mechanical turk system in which users transcribe the audio manually and in return users gain credit (to which we would base GRC rewards upon).
I began to translate the interview with Travis Desell on the YouTube channel
If more people would do something like that I think more people could be interested in these hangouts. Sometimes it is really difficult to unterstand the conference.
Excellent! Thanks for taking time to translate the interviews for the Gridcoin community, what language are you translating them to?
I try to translate in German. I'm German native Speaker, but often it is difficult to unterstand the speech and then sometimes the english transcription helps. If someone could improve the english transcription before I translate it into German, it would be very helpful.
Maybe it would be helpful, if we use the autmatically created transcription from google in the YouTube channel and improve the text manualy. The next step would be to translate this text into diffrent languages.
Yeah, this is indeed a manual process that can be performed - extracting the auto generated transcription from youtube videos once they're processed. There is a delay before google performs this transcription though.
We could do some kind of mechanical turk system for watching chunks of the video and confirming the extracted subtitles.
We could simply use google translate against these extracted transcriptions, but that would be quite messy.