Brainstorming new BOINC project ideas! Your ideas wanted!
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. The cost of computation from other distributed computing cryptocurrency networks is significantly higher!
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Outdated guides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.
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!
I have a concrete suggestion. There are several combinatorics-related sequences I can think of that are well suited for highly parallelized distributed computing, but for which only a few terms have been explicitly calculated due to exponential computational complexity. Here are two examples: OEIS A088672 and OEIS A028420. I have already written fully parallelized and optimized code for both of these; other sequences which I have in mind would be similarly easy to code.
Actually, this summer I had intended to create my own BOINC project along these lines. One of my friends was supposed to take care of the server side of things, but he fell through on his commitment. So the idea hasn't gone anywhere yet.
Here's an idea though. If someone wants to work with me to get a project up and running (I manage code for workunits, other people manage servers), then that project could be used as a foundation for more ambitious objectives, like the 'MicroGrid' concept I've heard mentioned before. The key point would be that the combinatorics problems I proposed would provide a steady and inexhaustible supply of workunits.
@h202 Interesting - please get in touch with me on [email protected].
@pomegranatepool @hotbit
If you're interested, we should try to make it happen. It's about time I follow through all the way with one of my ideas. I can dust off my old code and make sure it's BOINC-worthy. Shouldn't take too long in principle.
What would be a good way to communicate? Creating a new Discord server? It looks like that's free.
@cm-steem You're right that getting a basic test server up and running is easy. On the other hand, getting a fully fledged project site up -- complete with dedicated servers and robust workunit pipeline --seems like a lot more work.
Last weekend I was just checking out how to set up a server... nice timing. But I have close to zero sys admin experience. What about hardware? I could be interested to join if possible.
Running a BOINC project is pretty simple using boinc server docker, you can distribute work through the supported boinc-to-docker tool. "A 10min task"
its not hard to compile the damn boinc server from source code located here @ https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/SourceCodeGit vs using some cheesy docker bullshit... Yes lets run a visualization on virtual server GO RESOURCES! Did you notice Win10 incorporated docker native and then dev dropped , gee go wonder why... There are project admins like yoyo whom are helpful and you can ask to help setup your server and even help admin.. But if you cant compile something yourself you shouldn't be running it , because who the hells going to maintain it if you cant?
You do realize the linked source code is for the BOINC CLIENT, right? @cm-steem is talking about using Marius' docker container for the BOINC SERVER.
I have a project that comes to mind. I have wrote up some ideas to use Boinc to help find a cure for alzheimer's and other brain issues. Like Pick Disease -https://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/guide/picks-disease#1 It could be part of World Community grid. Just don't know how to get the right ideas on paper to make it interesting enough for to get anybody interested in starting this project.
You could always submit a proposal to WCG 👍
Do you plan to start a BOINC server?
Good timing for this topic.
A few days ago I have found two open source (sister) projects; they already use distributed computing and I've seen discussions about launching BOINC projects (to get more computing power), one of them even discussed launching own blockchain (to incentivize crunchers). They have vibrant communities and it would be a win-win situation if we could cooperate. (For them FLOPS, for us cooperation with similar communities and exposure to China and Korea, to name just a few). One of the hurdles would be anti-cheating measures, as doubling WUs would not work.
Time to get some sleep, I'll contact you on slack later...
Not yet, no. I've come up with many ideas for projects (see linked past threads), but not implemented any yet. Possibly in a year or two's time.
Sounds cool, though if the project is the distributor of rewards then their volunteers could be considered employees, no? I'd be interested in further researching their ideas though, can you name these projects?
Leela Zero is a community research in AI applied to game Go. Go is a big deal in Japan, China and Korea.
LeelaChessZero is a fork of the above / younger sibling.
There is a bunch of very smart people in both projects. We could count on strong synergy effect, if we could get into a relationship. As anti-cheating guard is not as easy as in other projects, implementation would be a step forward in distributed computing area and AI on BOINC platform. If you dig deeper, these projects have much more significance than appears on the surface.
The other idea I have for some time (and above just comes into that picture) is AI / machine learning on BOINC. Machine learning community is huge and has enormous hardware resources. Thus they could be both donors and receptors of compute resources. But other projects (Golem, Hadron) are working hard to get them on board - competition is strong.
great post my dear friend @cm-steem
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Yes post your ideas here so they can get jacked and some asshat run with your ideas and projects and fuck them all up....We will say it nicer than I mean it , but watch your idea get HUMAN rigged. Nice copy/paste post , you didn't have to personalize this post even 1 letter keystroke , all 100% just copy paste , even the posts for stealing ideas isn't original its just copy/paste/recycle... You need to smoke more meth and get creative buddy.