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Outdated guides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.
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
Bitshares projects
#006
#005
#004
#003
#002
#001
Great summary :)
I've joined the gridcoin pool a week ago :D
Sounds a lot like Golem, but with a working platform that has seen two decades of development instead of a theoretical product. =)
Exactly, no need to wait for others developments, BOINC is production ready and the only hurdle is your own developments using whatever commercial off the shelf software you have skills in utilizing.
A possible project could be to running several analysis on steem content to improve the quality of the post being posted here and the rewards system
Im talking accounts relationship with each other , topic and sentiment analysis , gathering stats from the netwotk , analyzing the network graph and so on ,
I've thought about this recently, it's certainly an interesting area of research.. we can utilize almost any kind of distributed computation through BOINC, anything in mind in particular you'd be interested in?
ty @cm-steem man, for all what you doing for community!
Thanks, any ideas for a potential BOINC project? :)
Sorry fo late answer, but nope i didn't) Sir :)
Also, even Gridcoin did not have a good representation in my native language (at least), but you know - my work depends on yours! So, just keep it up man!
Never heard of this ! Sounds like it can benefits a lot in many ways.
Hi cm-steem, if i get you clear, is this an ICO?if not, where can i get it from any coin exchange because it sounds like a great opportunity to experiment.please i need some feedback because i want to give it a trial.thank for sharing such a wonderful info.you have my vote,resteem and follow.you can do thesame.lets steem on!
It is not an ICO, you can get it from Bittrex, Poloniex, and possibly bleutrade. It's at a great price for stocking up right now. Check out http://www.gridcoin.us , tons of information there.
No ICO, BOINC is production ready and takes a couple days to get a project live and crunching your data.
You could perform your own project fundraising for developing the BOINC project you have in mind..
If you're talking about gridcoin, it's in production too & actively rewarding BOINC computation.
Upvoted and RESTEEMED!
I was a SETI@ Home volunteer for 4 years is good to see that the BOINC project it's up and running!
Thanks for your contributions towards SETI over the years :)
Good!
Great article!
How many~ votes you need to be whitelisted project?