I’ve seen a few posts recently looking into strengths and weaknesses of Gridcoin. One issue brought up was the dependence on BOINC (which Gridcoin doesn’t control) for computational material.
Here are a few reasons that isn’t a big deal and why BOINC will not be running out of projects that need crunching anytime soon:
1. As more computational power comes online and more success stories pile up, more researchers will hear about BOINC and design projects for it.
2. Existing projects could be scaled up, WAY UP, and some already hope to be.
3. Gridcoin could make its own BOINC projects.
4. Gridcoin can function without BOINC projects.
(1) World Community Grid reaches out to scientists and encourages them to come up with projects. They even give out grants to help. They just did this for projects focused on Climate Change.
As mentioned in some of my other posts, BOINC has contributed to lots of journal articles and research publications. As more researchers hear about BOINC and its successes, more will want to get projects going.
(2) Existing projects, could scale up, and several have!
SETI@home has been around for well over a decade. Since they started they’ve collected new data and reprocessed older data in new ways. Right now only a small fraction of the sky is being recorded and at a fraction of available wavelengths.
The Clean Energy Project, which I’ve mentioned before, has goals of scaling up by many (MANY) orders of magnitude. They’ll have work even when we all have quantum computers in our phones! So far, a couple million molecules have been modeled for one or two characteristics or uses. The project's creator told me “My research group has huge hopes of understanding the entire molecular space, which is composed of 10^60 to 10^180 synthesizable molecules”.
Scientific models can usually be run at a better resolution (spatial, temporal, etc) to achieve (hopefully) greater accuracy. These improvements in spatial or temporal resolution dramatically increase computational needs.
The search for ever larger prime numbers (and making sure none are missed) is very computationally intensive. A project already exists doing this and it may never end! (Thanks @dutch for the comments!)
(3) Gridcoin/Gridcoin users could even make BOINC projects. I know there are scientists (I am one) and lots of smart creative people who are involved in Gridcoin. If projects are ever in short supply (which I doubt will happen for the reasons listed above) then surely some passionate research-minded Gridcoiners will come up with some great ideas to put our computers to use. As mentioned by a commenter, there has already been at least one Gridcoin project on BOINC.
(4) Gridcoin doesn't need BOINC to function. I added this after getting some great feedback in the comments, so see @vortac's comment below for details. Basically Gridcoin could revert to using Proof-of-Stake only.
Feel free to check out my other posts on science, photography, volunteer computing, sustainability, cryptocurrencies with a purpose, and travel. Here are some of my favorites:
Science, Volunteer Computing, and Gridcoin
Let Your Computer Dream About Science While You Sleep (& Earn Cryptocurrency For Doing So!)
Steemit Writers, Science Needs Your Help! Get the word out on how any computer or Android can boost research on cancer, astrophysics, clean energy & more!
The Best Volunteer Computing Screensavers – Crowdsourcing Project
Scientists of Steemit! Tell us about your research on #Science!
BOINC – Impressive Accomplishments and Incredible Potential
Photography and Travel
Hawaii – Lava and Plants
Death to Snowballs!
End of the Road – Lava!
Sunset Over Mt. Tamalpais, California
Toque Macaques in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka
Birds on San Francisco Bay – With GIFs
Elephant Seals of Año Nuevo State Park, California
My Favorite Places to Backpack in the US
Why You Should Visit Arkansas: Mountains, Rivers, Public Diamond Mines & Great Food!
Photo Sphere / 360 Photos - I use Google StreetView App, Any other Recommendations?
Sleepy Lizard
Sustainability and Climate
Renewable Energy Now Provides More Electricity Than Nuclear in the US
Affordable Grid-Scale Storage Is Coming. (And in some places it has already arrived)
Using Algae for Wastewater Treatment and Biofuel Production
Why Climate Progress Will Continue in the USA.
Six Non-tree Things Paper Can be Made From (I promise these are interesting)
Drawdown - The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming
I might just add to this that there are several (lots) of scientific compute problems that are trivial to code relative to the amount of compute they can consume.
Some examples:
The search for primes can consume an infinitely amount of compute, forever, until someone develops an algorithm to find all primes. This may never happen.
The interactions of molecules. On top of just folding individual proteins and 1-1 interactions, there are endlessly complex poorly understood reactions that can be investigated. If we had infinite compute, we could as an example take a virus and model the interaction of every known molecule with it.
Analysis of data from space-ward arrays is limited by analysis throughput. If we could guarantee 100 TFLOPS of throughput, many institutions and arrays would be more than happy to gather enough data to fill that processing bandwidth.
Thanks! These are great examples. I touched on a couple and will expand them. I thought about mentioning primes and will do so now!
Do you know how to go about writing an application for BOINC? I do work in MRI, and would love to work on a project that facilitated distributed MRI and fMRI processing. As models become more sophisticated, universities are renting supercomputer time more and more to do tasks. I'm curious whether BOINC is a competitor to say, amazon AWS or if there are restrictions to what BOINC can do; how difficult is it to write an application for BOINC and get it started; and how does Gridcoin choose to whitelist a project.
I am doing this right now for research into neuro-degenerative diseases, as our supercomputer (we had a BlueGene-P) was decommissioned.
The two most timeconsuming steps as far as I am concerned are:
Breaking the problem down into manageable steps that can be processed in parallel. Obviously if your problem is 'embarrassingly parallel' (that is a technical term guys, i'm not being a douche) this is not a problem.
Wrapping the problem so that you get reasonable performance across many types of hardware. You could also choose to just wrap for GPUs if the sheer number of cores far outweighs the versatility of a CPU. I am still testing this one...
Great questions! The BOINC website has some resources (some of which look pretty old) and if your interest is in medicine, contacting World Community Grid might be a good idea. Someone on here can probably give a better answer to this part, but Gridcoin chooses whitelist projects through a voting process. Projects that make it tend to do involve beneficial research with fairly steady available work units that BOINC users have equal access to.
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/boinc.pdf https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/ProjectMain#CreatingaBOINCproject http://www.gridcoin.us/Guides/whitelist.htm
The claims that Gridcoin rely to much on BOINC and that it can go down is over exaggerated. BOINC is Open Source and can be set up by anyone. There are several projects currently in existing that are using BOINC that aren't on the whitelist of projects.
There is no risk that BOINC will seize to exist suddenly without any notice since it's both running projects that would tell in due time that they will spin down and the fact that the code for making a new server is easily obtainable by anyone trough GitHub.
So no, it will not disappear tomorrow, or next month either. These latest post has been very vivid hypothetical "What-if" senarios without any real substance.
That's not possible, nobody would vote to whitelist such a project and it would only be a burden, since Gridcoin is a Proof-of-Stake crypto and BOINC calculations are rewarded on top of Proof-of-Stake mechanism (i.e. BOINC projects aren't really necessary for the functioning of the network and in an emergency Gridcoin can carry on without BOINC, reverting to Proof-of-Stake only).
Thanks for the feedback and info! I made edits. Just to make sure, you are referring to the meaningless calculations part not the creation of projects by Gridcoin users in general part?
Yes, anyone can create any BOINC project, Gridcoin users included. In fact, we even had a project called Gridcoin Finance, running for quite some time. But of course, even a project created by Gridcoin users has to get whitelisted first. And if it's just meaningless rubbish without any useful purpose, then it won't pass the whitelisting vote.
I agree @johnniec, didnt I see the scientists behind the clean energy project say that once they finish with solar panels, they would like to start generalised research into novel compounds for all kinds of other applications.
Yes indeed. They could scale that project up by so many orders of magnitude we could probably run billions of computers on it for decades.
Certainly doesn't look like they'll be running out of projects anytime soon!
Happy Tuesday!🌟
Great content!
Thanks for sharing!@johnniec
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.
yeah!
started following you :) @johniniec
Upvoted and also resteemed :)
Thank you!
Interesting post. Thank you very much. I'm following you now.
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it. Looks like I was already following you!
I also believe in the Golem worldwide supecomputer that utilises its own currency. I'm using Boinc for years now earning gridcoins and in the old days ripple coins. So does Golem compete with BOINC ?
I use BOINC for 5+ years now and still love it. First I earned ripple coin and then gridcoin. But I have to say over the years you get less and lesser for your computing. Still fun and gives me a good feel too
I've definitely gotten less, but that is a good sign! More people joining, people putting bigger computers to work on BOINC, etc. I read an interesting article on here about using cheap single board computers to BOINC. Maybe you and I should look into that! https://steemit.com/gridcoin/@jimbo88/i-just-wanna-boinc-part-3-alternative-single-board-computers