I started doing this with SETI@Home. And have continued to run these sorts of programs on my computers ever since. SETI@Home used BOINC, which is still used by other projects. I also use World Community Grid. Highly recommend!!
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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I currently have tasks qued/being worked on, from World Community Grid, yoyo@home, and Rosetta@home.
I just started running tasks for yoyo[@home, and by golly. These tasks are freaking HUGE! The shortest task estimate is 2 days, and 18 hours.
Rosetta@home offered up tasks that took me more than a day for most, to be completed.
World Community Grid has been the best in completing tasks and not taking more than a day to finish. The longest estimated time to completion has been under 9 hours.
I miss Folding@Home with Playstation 3.
This time of year I take the computer running my home NAS and move it to my bedroom and set up BOINC. Literally keeps the room 7-10 degrees (F) warmer.
It's also about the same electric-to-thermal efficiency as a regular space heater, so if that's how you heat, there's no reason not to.
Unless of course you have a heat pump (or an A/C with a reversing valve, which is the same thing). Which by all means please use that instead. You're not going to top a heat pump in terms of efficiency. We're talking 300% efficient heat production minimum. Best you can hope for with electric heating is 100%.
Well then you have me, I waited until winter to rip my DVD collection to my NAS, because if I was going to spend several weeks with 2 or 3 PCs blasting at 100% CPU, I might as well wait until it's furnace season rather than air conditioner season.
Even if you have a heat pump, the PCs efficiency does not change compared to a space heater. The heat pump existing does not change this.
Well obviously. The point I'm making is that you shouldn't just use your PC to heat your home unless you're already using it as a PC simultaneously.
Pretty sure it's 100% efficient (100% energy consumed is emitted as heat) meaning it's exactly as efficient as a space heater. Only way to get more efficient is a heat pump.
They're all kind of old, though. Most of the active ones seem like 5-10 years old. Are there any recent new projects?
And are the projects from like 2009 still feasable? I mean both argorithms and compute hardware in the datacenters of those universities may have made leaps forwards since then?
That's a good question.
From what I've gathered from my recent experience of running tasks, the project might have started years ago, but they are still offering tasks to be completed.
Einstein@Home does pulsar and (continuous) gravitational wave research. They have some long-running pulsar projects, which still find new pulsars getting published, and continuous gravitational wave research usually has a new project every 6-12 months.
The algorithms are improving all the time, and so do the volunteer computers.
I wonder how much of this is because of crypto. Option to get paid appears, and donations go down.
This is really cool.
Which of these make their data publically available?
Because the greatest scientific contribution would not be hording the data so you can publish your paper, but making it freely available, so any group of researchers can look through it and contribute to scientific knowledge by analysing the findings in different ways
There's also a list here, though last updated in 2020: https://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html
Most of those projects remain active in some form.
I was going to mention ArchiveTeam's warrior because I thought it wouldn't be listed, since computing isn't really the important thing you're donating, more your virgin IP address and internet connection... but it's third on the list!
Finally something I am participating in ;)
OONI monitors internet censorship and other forms of network interference, especially by state actors, worldwide. It's an important contributor to digital rights and freedoms IMO, and you can run their client in the background to contribute non-personal data on pretty much any device.
They also make great pizza ovens
I used to have this docker image for Archive Team running. I've helped archive a hundred gigabytes or so of reddit data. After a couple reset of my home server, I don't have it running right now.
I prefer bitcoin. You're doing a lot of great work helping society get rid of those awful financial institutions by verifying transactions.
It uses much less energy too
Bitcoin uses less energy? Now that's something I haven't heard of before.
The jerk is taking about Bitcoin vs Banks/Finance, not vs BOINC
Yep. Theres a lot of misinformation due to bank lobbys propaganda. Bitcoin was designed to be more efficient.
It doesn't need humans to deal with transaction reversals (this was a key part of the design per the white paper), so you cut out all the energy that goes into creating buildings for offices and maintaining them. Also it scales up without using additional energy, so if you actually look at the numbers it uses magnitudes less energy.
This is just silly. If you had said Etherium, then maybe. But Bitcoin?? C'mon...
Cant disagree with facts
You clearly can.
"proof-of-work" process today requires 705 kWh of electricity, ".
And I'm done.
And that's magnitudes less than all traditional financial institutions
And how many magnitudes less transactions does Bitcoin do than all traditional financial institutions?
Yep, now you're seeing my point. As bitcoin scales up, it uses no additional energy. That's the kicker.
But as traditional finance scales up, the energy required increases with no limits. Thats why bitcoin uses magnitudes less energy than these dumb and wasteful banking systems.