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.
A BOINC OG in the wild! This does actually exist. Around 10 years ago [email protected] started incentivizing BOINC. They basically asked the question “Instead of minting coins for mining hashes, what if people had to do BOINC work instead?”. Gridcoin mints cryptocurrency for participation in most BOINC projects (and folding@home) and are a sizeable portion of BOINC’s total computational capacity. On some of the math projects, Gridcoin crunchers are 60-80% of the total capacity. And because there’s no other proof-of-work element, 100% of the energy usage still goes to BOINC. Participation in Gridcoin is entirely optional, if people want to volunteer with no incentive they are certainly welcome to.
It’s not “profitable” to mine/crunch Gridcoin for most people most of the time, the same is true for all crypto mining. But it can help with the electric bill if you are crunching with multiple rigs. Most people most of the time are breaking even or losing money because these systems are self-balancing. It follows this pattern in a loop: People hear mining is “profitable” -> People flock to the project and turn on their rigs -> Increased amount of miners decreases reward per miner -> Miners find it is “not profitable” ->- Miners leave.
There are certainly some miners who find ways to make it profitable due to re-using waste heat, having crazy efficient equipment, taking advantage of negative electric rates, etc.
One benefit of the way it works is that Gridcoin distributes the computational power among all projects equally. This means smaller projects get as much computation as more popular projects, and that scientists with new BOINC projects can approach Gridcoin to be approved and go from no volunteers to a petaflop of processing power overnight.
BOINC also has a pre-approved project list via Science United that offers a similar turnkey guarantee of computational power. Science United is the same as BOINC but instead of choosing specific scientific computing projects, you choose research ‘areas’ like health, math, etc and it automatically attaches your BOINC client to pre-approved projects in those areas.
This is awesome! Thank you!
Mining most things hasn’t been profitable for a decade, as you say, except for specialized rigs. Even then, out often doesn’t offset the costs. However, this is a great thing - it provides an incentive on top of philanthropy that isn’t harmful; less wasteful than the branded return mapping labels your charity sends.
Thanks again!