Brainstorming BOINC projects #003
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 milkyway, fold proteins, search for extraterrestrial life, etc.
Currently, there are approx 580,000 active BOINC users & more then 4 million registered accounts. There's serious computing power being untapped at the moment.
IEEE: 2006 - The Computational and Storage Potential of Volunteer Computing
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).
- GPUGRID: Full-atom molecular simulations of proteins
- Milkyway@home : Creation of a 3d map of the milkyway galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.
Examples of more whitelisted projects.
How does Gridcoin benefit BOINC?
The Gridcoin network rewards BOINC volunteers on behalf of the whitelisted BOINC projects. As a result, more computation is pointed at their projects without costing the BOINC project admins a penny.
By comparison, a BOINC project admin would have to fork out serious cash to get an equal level of computing power out of Maidsafe/Golem/etc.
Who can make a BOINC project?
Anyone can create a BOINC project, there's no centralised authority that you are required to consult before creating a BOINC project.
How can I make a BOINC project?
IMO, the easiest method of creating a BOINC project is to use the 'BOINC Server Docker' repo! It takes the majority of manual configuration out of the picture allowing you to focus on customization & the creation of your application/work units.
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Outdated guides
- 'Creating BOINC projects (PDF)'
- 'Project creation cookbook'
- 'Building BOINC and BOINC applications on linux'
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.
BOINC DAC (Theoretical)
A "BOINC deentralized autonomous company" is a theoretical extension on the 'Commercial/For-Profit' project type.
Further research&development is required to decentralize the BOINC web server stack.
Existing research (mostly storage decentralization, not 100% decentralized)
- Optimizing the data distribution layer of BOINC with BitTorrent.
- Attic: A Case Study for Distributing Data in BOINC Projects.
- Extending the BOINC architecture using peer-to-peer application code exchange.
BOINC vs Cloud computing platforms
Research papers
- The cost of virtualization implementation in volunteer computing
- Increasing GP Computing Power for Free via Desktop GRID Computing and Virtualization
- [PDF] Cost-Benefit Analysis of Cloud Computing versus Desktop Grids
TL;DR: (Note - 7 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 below! You don't need to have the skills to implement the project, we want to hear all ideas! :)
I'll repost your ideas each month afterwards to immortalize the idea until it is created! ;D
Best regards,
CM.
Why is this thread being reposted?
Due to complexities in Steemit's reward mechanism, there is a 30 day maximum window for replying to threads. After 30 days have passed, the thread is effectively archived/dead.
In order to continuously brainstorm possible BOINC projects this thread will be reposted every 30 days.
Past threads
Decentralization of the BOINC web server
Discussing this topic on the BeyondBitcoin hangout (1hr 23mins in!)
Graphene: Witnesses each running a mirror of a BOINC web server, randomly pick one to publish their work unit verification info to the network & have the other witnesses confirm it's correct. Would have to scale back the functionality of the BOINC project web server.
Could alternatively not utilize BOINC, using a more appropriate distributed computing platform/technology - CONDOR, Wikipedia: Comparison of cluster software.
Gridcoin would not be compatible with non-BOINC solutions though, unless the DPOR/NeuralNetwork mechanisms were adapted.
Shared on twitter
Thanks, appreciated! :)
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
Super-node/Full-node project
Type: Commercial
It's important to run full node clients for your cryptocurrency, but for most cryptocurrencies there is no reward mechanism for running a full node.
An interesting idea for a BOINC project would be to distribute a docker unit containing a (verified secure) cryptocurrency full node client. This wouldn't just be for a single cryptocurrency but for multiple cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum, etc..) - customers could pay to have more computing resources dedicated to running full nodes for a set period of time & the majority of fees could be distributed to those running the full nodes.
The main difficulty would be ensuring that the full node client ports were not blocked - there would need to be a benchmark/verification stage checking full connectivity (verifying full node capability). Secondary difficulty would be deciding how to reward users - bandwidth/connections/uptime etc.
It would be very cool to collaborate with the 21.CO guys - they already distribute rewards to users for running their software, perhaps they would be interested in distributing out their software to tens of thousands of new users?
Opensim/Hypergrid servers
Type: Commercial/BDAC
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Hypergrid
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List
Imagine we distributed Opensim docker containers and linked them together via Hypergrid. There would need to be replication of the worlds to prevent downtime in the event of a volunteer/worker node going offline.
Users would need to prioritise up-time and perhaps there would need to be a minimum computer spec for this to be feasible.
Customers could rent land within the opensim servers & these fees could be distributed to those running the opensim servers.
Additionally, there is currently no in-game cryptocurrency, only centralised payment options. You could integrate cryptocurrency to increase usage of Gridcoin/Steem/SBD within the servers for in-game items or property sales/inventory.
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Economy
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Money
http://forge.opensimulator.org/gf/project/currency/
BARK: Distributing Apache Spark over BOINC
Project type: Commercial
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cse400/CSE400_2015_2016/reports/report_32.pdf
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cse400/CSE400_2015_2016/posters/poster_32.pdf
We've attempted to contact the students who worked on BARK, they have graduated so we need to contact them via social media (we believe we've found 2 of them, they work for google and mongodb - pretty smart dudes!).
I feel like this would be a massively successful commercial BOINC project if created!
Also mentioned here: https://cryptocointalk.com/topic/10694-brainstorm-session-ideas-for-boinc-projects/?p=221090
#BigData #Java #Scala #Python
https://spark.apache.org/
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheApacheSpark