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 Milky Way, fold proteins, search for extraterrestrial life, etc.

Currently, there are approximately 176,000 active BOINC users & over 4.5 million registered accounts. There's serious computing power within the BOINC community and the vast majority of that work 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 Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.

Examples of more Gridcoin-whitelisted projects.

How does Gridcoin benefit BOINC?

The Gridcoin network rewards BOINC volunteers for the work done on whitelisted BOINC projects. As a result, more computation is pointed towards their projects without costing them a penny...

By comparison, a project administrator would have to fork out serious cash (pay-to-play) to get an equal level of computing power out of Maidsafe/Golem/etc. These platforms also limited in their possible types of computation. Through BOINC you can distribute any kind of distributed computing application.

Who can make a BOINC project?

Anyone can create a BOINC project, as there is 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Outdated guides

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)

BOINC vs Commercial Cloud Computing

Research papers

Research TL;DR: (Note - 8 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 in the comments below!

You don't have to know how to code or anything like that. This thread is for brainstorming ideas. Put your ideas out there, and maybe someone else will come along and make it for you!

By posting an idea to this thread, you agree to open sourcing the idea under the MIT license within the BOINC brainstorming thread repo.

Why is this thread being reposted?

It's been a while. Perhaps we've all come up with some new and different ideas that are worth discussing. :)

Past threads

#007
#006
#005
#004
#003
#002
#001

Brainstorming BOINC Projects #008