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Outdated guides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!