Will you BOINC with me?

[keira]

There's been a recent resurgence of BOINC discussion on my site, and it leads me to prompt the question, does anyone here use BOINC or some other grid-computing client? If so, what projects?

 

I've been using it for awhile now, and I do six projects. My two projects with the most credit are SETI and World Community Grid, mostly because they are the only projects my heavy-hitter host can access (thanks, school network). link to my stats. My favorite project is SIMAP, though, but they only release work units at the beginning of the month.

[Niemand]

I run BOINC on my laptop to do something useful with the spare cycles and to keep my hands from freezing at work. I contribute to the Einstein@Home project because I think that detecting gravitational waves would be a great step forward for physics, and in the meantime finding pulsars is pretty cool too. Judging by the name for my computer's current work unit, it's crunching through data from the Fermi LAT, which is fun since I used to work on a gamma-ray project (although a ground based one).

 

Since finding out my RLN is generally a trivial exercise anyway: Stats Link

I've haven't been making much progress lately because I've been needing my CPU for my own work, but maybe this discussion will remind me to leave BOINC running over night a bit more frequently.

[Aran]

I guess you already know I do, since I used to automatically spam my progress on Facebook (nowadays it just tweets).

 

I don't run it on my laptop, because it interferes with the dynamic frequency scaling and makes the CPU fan go wild. Just on the old desktop, which I mostly use as a NAS.

 

Stats.

 

Edit: Heh, I actually registered in 2005. That was just after the classic SETI client was replaced with BOINC.

[Luca]

Let's bring this back up to shift the topic away from gender.

 

As far as BOINCing goes, I currently only subscribe to World Community Grid, finding it to be the best use of my minuscule processing power. While it would be undeniably nice to have a host of computers dedicated to grid computing in general, something I find to be a particularly nice idea, it's just not something I can afford. But a small donation of idle or otherwise wasted CPU time is better than nothing.

 

BOINC stats

 

WCG specific stats

[keira]

So I'm hosting my website on a VM.

 

I have four virtual cores. At normal usage it's one core at around 20%.

 

So I put BOINC on my server.

 

Would that be considered cheating or...

[TriRodent]

I'm involved with grid computing as well, starting with SETI back in the mid 90s under a long forgotten user name & long defunct email address (although I wish there was some way to look up those stats as I'd be curious to see just what I was able to accomplish way back when). Today I'm pretty much exclusively on BOINC/WCG ( my stats if anyone cares).

 

At one point a few years ago I/we had about 8+ computers exclusively grinding away on grid projects. Today though that number has been cut in half & my production is way down. While it'd be nice to have a few new powerful computer flying through several hundred work units every day, I'm perfectly content with this older gear as it does everything else that I need it to.

 

As to the projects themselves I'd rather devote my time towards the more physical type of projects (water, energy, rice, etc) than the assorted theoretical ones (cancer cures, other medical, etc). However the main personal goal is to get to a years worth of work on each project before switching out to another one. Doesn't always happen but that's the goal anyway.