Impact of GDPR on World Community Grid

World Community Grid (WCG) is a computing grid which uses Internet-connected computers to perform research in various projects. It is co-ordinated by IBM and uses BOINC to exchange work-units and results with participating computers.

Since GDPR has come into effect on May 25th, it is not allowed to extract user information anonymously from the WCG website. This means that stats websites (like BOINCStats) but also Gridcoin can’t receive this information anymore. As a result, Gridcoin was forced to greylist the project until all legal and technical aspects are resolved because user information is required to calculate earnings for performed work.

This made me wonder whether it had any impact on the science output of WCG now the competition element (the stats) and the earnings for Gridcoin have disappeared. Fortunately you can still extract the daily team credits & results from the website, which gave me the opportunity to test whether the output has declined since 25-May.

In the four charts below, you will find the daily credits and results for WCG and team Gridcoin. I took a period of three months, two months before and one month after the implementation date, to better assess any trends.

(Data source: World Community Grid website)

Analysing the charts above, I could draw the following conclusions:

• The overall output has not been affected (or only marginally) by the implementation of GDPR.
• Without the ability to compare teams or users, the competition effect doesn’t seem to be important to participate in the project.
• The output for team Gridcoin has declined by 30% since 25-May, which shows that GRC earnings are a driver to participate in the project. On the other hand it doesn’t have an impact on the overall scientific output of WCG.

So lets see when the user information is available again but at least until now WCG and its scientific endeavours aren’t affected yet (which is really positive).

Gridcoin is an open source cryptocurrency (Ticker: GRC) which securely rewards volunteer computing performed upon the BOINC platform in a decentralized manner on top of proof of stake.

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is a distributed Internet platform launched beginning of 2002 and rewards participants with credits for performed work. BOINC is an application available for multiple Operating Systems and utilises the unused CPU and GPU cycles on computers to perform scientific work.

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Image source: (1) Header image, (2) Gridcoin logo, (3) BOINC logo, (4) all charts by Hive account@parejan