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Outdated guides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 the idea under the MIT license within the BOINC brainstorming thread repo.
Past threads
I was reading a bit about Gridcoin and i think is awesome that support the BOINC project.
It not consume too much CPU or GPU power? Can use my GPU AMD? The PC should be always on?
I dont run my computer 24/7 on BOINC, I have solar power so only run my PC in daylight.
I use a Raspberry Pi to stake my coins 24/7, which uses only about 3 watts of power.
The Gridcoin client is not too power hungry, but running BOINC does use a lot of electricity.
When staking with the Gridcoin client it should stake 24/7 for maximum chance to earn your owed GRC.
Id like to see Gridcoin Research rejuvinated, but I guess Rob didnt want to continue with it. I think that would be an ideal project considering some of the recent ICOs.
You mean Gridcoin Finance?
I think he does. I believe it was some IRL priorities perhaps combined with regulations that got in the way of GRCF taking off.
@Scalextrix is right though, a token backed BOINC project distributed via ICO/IPO/"donation" would be a formidable BOINC project!
Yeah
I would still like to see an improved WUProp. So it would gather data the data WUProp was gathering and a bit more, but more importantly it would display that data in a more effective way than WUProp. This will help people with deciding what to run, because it tells them what their pc would be best at running (and COULD tell them how to maximize profits as well).
Check out this thread on cryptocointalk: https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/50952-gridcoinboinc-profitability-calculations/
We discuss the need for a profitability calculator, the disadvantages of wuporp, potential uses of the hosts.xml.gz extracts from each BOINC project & an insight into such a development being implemented on gridcoinstats.eu