Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer | Hacker News Reader

Boinc lets you help cutting-edge science research using your computer

boinc.berkeley.edu

118 pointsdoener87 comments

The SETI@Home screensaver [0] (the predecessor to BOINC) was the peak of nerd-cool when I was 11 or 12 years old. I had no idea what any of the graphs meant, and still don't, but I knew that I could help find _aliens_, and look like a hacker doing it

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home?useskin=vector#/medi...

> Since its launch on May 17, 1999, the project has logged over two million years of aggregate computing time

What a waste of computing time!

Just wait until you hear about Bitcoin

Just wait until you hear about most ecommerce platforms doing `SELECT * FROM` just to display 2 columns.

what if your table just has two columns?

Even more interesting is the software that does SELECT * FROM just to display two rows.

Just wait till you hear about the developers out there doing `select* from` and then using reduce inside their api server to sum up the values of a column.

SETI wasn't a waste of time don't have any good alternatives to it. Folding@home on the other hand probably could have been a lot more useful if they were training transformers on their results instead of just doing pure protein dynamics simulations.

Folding@Home predates the ML approaches to protein folding. Just because it has been eclipsed now doesn’t mean it wasn’t worthwhile.

Well, it predates the deep-learning ML approaches to protein folding like Alphafold. But people have been applying ML methods to protein folding for decades -- that has long been the two camps in the protein-folding bioinformatics world -- whether the best way to get structures was to simulate what the protein was actually doing or if there was a computational shortcut.

The goal of protein folding simulations like Folding@Home is not to predict 3D structures - it's to understand how folding actually works, and why it sometimes doesn't work. When FAH came out it was already very obvious that there were good computational shortcuts to predicting the end state (the Rosetta approach), but those don't tell you very much about the physical process. Different questions call for different approaches.

Seti@home started a long long time ago, when computer used the same amount of power, if they worked hard or if the computer was idle. That's why they started as screensaver, it did just not matter.

Yes, I remember. But even then we knew full well the chance of identifying anything via SETI was minute. We were looking at a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of what's out there.

A tiny office full of grad students could have come up with a dozen more useful ways to use that many distributed computing cycles, say for medical research. Not only folding@home: imagine what a Wolfram or a Knuth would have achieved with all those cycles.

I suspect the useful things you can do with this model are quite limited. You need:

* A problem that can be cut into chunks small enough for a low end desktop computer

* One that's solvable without communicating with anything else

* The chunk is solvable enough that the user doesn't interrupt the process

* And the bandwidth usage is small

* And the solution is easily verifiable

* And the problem is big enough that it needs a vast amount of hardware to solve

* But is relatively unimportant, so nobody wants to spend any money to solve it faster

Especially the latter parts seem to mostly suggest quirky uses like SETI. If it's something important you can probably do it faster by just finding funding, than by trying to convince millions of people to install a screensaver.

Well, we know what they could have done. Nothing. Because both were around and active then and they didn't do anything. Folding@Home followed SETI@Home so we know offering a different thing would have participants.

It's actually fascinating. People back then would be eager to find ways to do things. So many people now are lamenters, not doers. Perhaps that's just mean reversion and the original population was more agentic because it was a new tech.

After the geeks and mops, perhaps the ones who follow are the lamenters.

If you're this salty about SETI being a waste Of computing cycles, wait till you learn about bitcoin.

It's weird people keep comparing this to Bitcoin.

That's like "Oh our best & brightest sunk years and billions into a known-bad type of Alzheimers research? Wait till you hear about Pets.com"

"known-bad" ... defined by you? Cause if the best & brightest did it (in this case SETI@Home) it seems they disagree with that categorization.

Well, one used maybe tens or hundreds of megawatt hours over the course of a year, while the other uses tens or hundreds of terawatt hours per year.

One was a launching platform for dozens of scientific and other large scale volunteer computing projects, and the other's value is entirely based in speculation.

What makes you think there would have been a folding@home without SETI@home?

When energy was cheap...

Before there was the mining of bitcoins, there was BOINC. Where your spare computing cycles helped cure cancer, find aliens, solve mathematical proofs.

And then self-interest trumped altruism.

I've commented this previously but I think the major impact to these applications was that CPUs more effectively idle themselves and reduce the fan speeds. Previously there was no noticeable impact with the PC running 100% all the time. Now the fan will go crazy compared to sitting idle. Not to mention there are computers that basically can't run 100% without some sort of duty cycle to cool back down and they will thermally throttle.

You can use runtime power limits to put yourself pretty much anywhere on the performance-efficiency curve you want, within thermal limits. Reducing the power limit will reduce heat/fan noise and can improve perf/watt.

On Linux, see: https://github.com/powercap/powercap

Old desktops with Boinc running 24/7 make an useful alternative to direct electric heating. Of course a heat pump is more efficient, but not everyone has that.

I have a central heat pump in my house, but it doesn't heat the basement very well. My solution for awhile was to run Folding@home on my server, since I figure pretty much every computer is a 100% efficient heater as well.

I eventually stopped because I work in my basement and the server was way too loud when running at full load, but it did a reasonably good job keeping my desk area nice and toasty.

How efficient is Boinc as a heating application? It's an important part of calcuating its climate impact.

Also, why old desktops only? Won't a brand new desktop running at 100% generate plenty of heat? Isn't the difference merely calculations per W?

Electronics do not move the needle at all when it comes to climate impact (in terms of heat dissipation). It's where the electricity is sourced that's the problem.

I think everyone understands it to mean that

I understand that; I didn't express my question clearly:

Given the electricity used, how efficient are (Boinc + my desktop) at generating heat? For example, is it equally efficient to use Boinc + Desktop to warm my office as it is to use a space heater, or electrical radiated heat?

A computer consuming 500 watts of power and an electric heater consuming 500 watts of power are equivalent.

Therefore, I think it's perfectly reasonable to run BOINC to warm your office.

If the goal is heating, you'd be better off with a heat pump, to get 300% or more of the input energy back as heat. Doesn't do computation as a side effect though.

It’s 100% efficient. All of the power is transformed into heat.

Thermodynamic efficiency is work/heat, so 0%.

But you want the heat, so it's ideal. Electricity goes in, heat comes out. One man's trash is another's treasure. The circle of life.

The situation is a bit different today. Back when Bionic and Set@home were more common the CPUs used more or less the same power whether they were idle or in full use. Nowadays however running something like this will run up considerable extra power usage and is no longer "free".

Citation needed. My understanding is that the only computers that were built this way were super computers using ecl logic. One of the key features of cmos logic was that is was much lower power when nothing was being done. Now admittedly DOS and I think windows95 liked to use busy waits and this does not help matters. But I still think the system got hotter under heavy load. Now I wish I still had an old pentium box around so I could measure power draw with dos and prime95.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emitter-coupled_logic

World Community Grid uses BOINC, and is back up and running after finding a new home.

https://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

I set it to run on a few cores of all my different machines. Keep it below 50% of the true core count, and the fan and heat increase is negligible, and science still gets done at a good rate. I've been a happy participant for years, and am glad they're still around, contributing to our mutual net benefit.

We launched LHC@home 2.0 at CERN around the time LHC itself was getting launched https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/. The project is still going and there are thousands of people from all over contributing.

Distributive DCP lets you compute other people's distributed research/workloads and get paid for it (no crypto involved).

Compute workloads get run in secure js/wasm compute nodes (which could be your browser, or a screensaver, etc). For instance, my friend built a Blender cycles renderer using it

It's cool tech continuing the awesome legacy of BOINC! I work at Distributive, AMA if you're curious

Very cool. Link?

Here's a link to our browser worker: https://dcp.work/

And other workers can be downloaded here: https://distributive.network/workers

Dev API for submitting jobs here: https://docs.dcp.dev/

:D feel free to email me <will@distributive.network> if you want to chat about anything

I browsed the website but was unable to find any information on how much credits are worth

A commercial version of Boinc - nothing wrong with that. However, the website give no indication of price, except a claim that it is less expensive then the cloud.

More important for this discussion: there is zero indication of what people earn, in return for offering their computing power. Which probably means that it isn't much - better to mine some random coin?

Boinc on old hardware will win you quite the electric bill. Are they sharing the profits from these discoveries with the contributors? No of course not, that's their IP. You let them use your hardware, pay for the power and bandwidth and they run laughing to the bank. "Boinc - Free supercomputing from the stupid"

It depends on the project, of course.

Speaking for Einstein@home, for example, all their research is public and you also get a mention in their paper if a result was in your workunit.

Price doesn't matter if you were going to use that electricity for heating anyway. Mostly the project are run by universities funded by tax payers, and don't exist to make any profit. Ever heard of charity?

You can also recoup some of the cost by attaching your Boinc to Gridcoin: https://gridcoin.us/

Heat pumps would be more efficient than resistive heating in silicon circuits.

But they don’t find aliens or fold proteins at the same time.

Yeah!! My one worthwhile box consumes 300 watts, and I made the mistake of folding covid-19 proteins for Boinc in the summer of '19. It was like a sauna in my office and the bill was eye-watering. Never again...

Summer of '19 is impressively early to be working on COVID-19 research.

It was bioweapons design research /s

Duh! Brain not working together with fingers... how about the summer of 20

Don't talk it down just because you don't like it and you are cheap

I did Rosetta for years and I was fully aware what and why I was supporting it...

"because you are cheap" What a weird take.

Expecting a monetary benefit from a BOINC project is the weird take.

Look if they want funding for their for profit venture they should just ask for your credit card number then go spend on AWS where the hardware is modern and the energy is efficiently used. But if they were upfront and asked directly for peoples hard earned money in exchange for nothing every sane human would say no, so there's this racket called boinc where they trick you into giving them your money indirectly and they laugh at you. You get a gold star if they find something with your "contribution". But they get a billion dollars for finding the next lucrative drug

This isn't pharmaceutical research.

protein folding simulation is to find drug targets

not all (or even most) of them are profit ventures, like at all. There are some along those lines.

I do Asteroids at home, they need help figuring out the shape and size of asteroids. The data is published for public use.

Link

https://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/

It's research. I benefit from it, you do too.

It's the responsibility of the society to do research and just because some capitalism based entities also do this and also benefit from this doesn't matter.

Start being less 'sane' if this holds you back formulating your own opinion or actions making society better ...

not all research benefits society and what does usually benefits the wealthy, which boinc users almost certainly aren't. The wealthy expect a return on an investment

Strong statement without any source or explanation.

I don't buy that.

It’s a simple any easy way to donate which you can start and stop and any time without handing over any financial details. You could, for example just decide to crank it up when your solar panels are generating an excess and the export rate is low.

The insistence in both of your comments that the people at Boinc are not only taking advantage of people but "laugh[ing] at them" is odd. Why must your boogeyman be as unlikeable as possible?

Well touché yes the truth is somewhere in the middle

???

For the majority of boinc projects its just citizen science, they results are published for free. No money is involved.

I donate my computer time (and corresponding electricity costs) to projects I believe in or find interesting.

Dude above said "electric bill", compute on older hardware is expensive. Modern hardware will be considered expensive in a few years too.

True when they discover aliens and sign exclusive mutual trade agreements you’ll be kicking yourself for not getting a cut of that. But at least they’ll be teleporting faster than light with alien tech laughing to the bank!

In my province electricity is $0.024 / kWh overnight (that's about $0.17 USD) so almost free and comes from almost entirely renewable sources.

So, I would be happy to run it every night (excepting July & August), but the BOINC Manager just didn't seem to work for me: created an account but then the account was not recognized.

If 8/10ths of your grid's energy is renewable with renewables maxxed out and the remainder coming from non-renewables, your energy use was 100% non-renewable because that non-renewable capacity would not have been necessary.

Anyone interested should also look into Gridcoin, you can get some crypto back in addition to doing some good science.

https://gridcoin.us/

+1 probably closest thing to a useful crypto you can find.

agreed, I am in general not a huge fan of Crypto.

For a non-crypto alternative, check out Distributive DCP [1]. You deploy compute workloads which are executed in secure wasm sandboxes (even in your browser [2]). People computing get paid to compute other people's workloads.

1. https://distributive.network/ 2. https://dcp.work/

Here's a backstory at https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php

It's quite interesting to see how it all began.

The peak of this project is largely behind us, although I was a proud member about 10 years ago.

I have tried Boinc in the past, I didn't find anything that was visually interesting for me locally - one cool thing about SETI was the screensaver and graphics, if anyone has any suggestions for something cool and fun I could exchange my energy money for, that'd be appreciated.

It's not based on Boinc, but I think Folding@Home has some decent visualizations

For at least some of the BOINC (ang GridCoin Proof-of-Research coin) projects, IIRC you need to already have virtualbox installed.

Virtualbox supports KVM but not sure whether virtualbox+KVM is supported by the BOINC projects?

Nice - loved a bit of Boinc at one point.

I have Vodafone DreamLab installed on my iPhone and set it each night to compute whilst charging. Nice to be able to utilise the phone for some good whilst I am asleep.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DreamLab

TIL. I wonder how they've solved the "don't kill my app" problem, to prevent the cpu getting clocked down to 200 MHz while the screen is off. And not being available to techies on f-droid or website download (needing to find a way to get it from Google Play servers) is a bit of a missed opportunity.

Edit: checking it out, it apparently comes with facebook analytics and other goodies: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/416699/ — this is why I hate dealing with the crap you find on alt stores like this "play" thing. Wouldn't have that if it just came in the official f-droid store! Anyway, I like its mission and it's a long-running project, released back in 2015. Cool stuff. Wonder how much compute power they get out of it, the website nor Wikipedia disclose that

i miss the days when running this sort of thing was not an obvious energy (and fan noise) tradeoff. i was big into the distributed.net [1] client in the late 90s, running it on my powermac. when i got to college in '98 seti@home had taken over everybody's screensavers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed.net

Is there any success stories out of this program?

Yes

I am curious, are the research results publicly available for free? How can we ensure that the provided computing power is not abused?

Is there something like this for LLMs? Can I donate an API key and set a usage limit?

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