I want to let you all know about what I think is one of the coolest yet most under-appreciated FOSS tools out there, it’s called BOINC lemmy at [email protected] . The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing has been around for decades and has delivered teraflops of computing to scientists on a daily basis for absolutely free.

BOINC has been used to map the universe, detect asteroids, search for aliens (remember seti@home?), fight cancer, and publish hundreds of scientific papers. The world’s largest particle accelerator (large hadron collider at CERN) even has a project you can compute for, who knows, you may find a new subatomic particle! Anybody with a computer, raspberry pi, or android can contribute their CPU or GPU to the cause and pick which projects they want to contribute to. You don’t need to be computer savvy or have a PhD to run it.

One of the awesome things about BOINC is that any scientists with interesting research can instantly access massive amounts of computational power for free. They don’t need time on a supercomputer or institutional backing, all they need is an interesting research concept and a spare laptop to run the server on.

I have been running BOINC for many years and find it very gratifying, I love getting to see the results. Hell, it even heats my house in the winter! If you have electric heat such as electric baseboards or space heaters (NOT heat pumps since they are >100% efficient), you can heat your house with computers and spend the exact same amount as your normal heat bill but also get science done in the process. Every watt of electricity you use in your house turns into heat. A blender is just as efficient at turning electricity into heat as a space heater. It sounds counter-intuitive, but ask your grade school physics teacher and you’ll find that the conservation of energy is not a controversial topic in physics. If you are spending 50W on a space heater, you could instead dump that 50W into your computer. You pay for and get 50W of heat either way, but only the computer does science along the way.