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RE: Gridcoin: Helping Find Cures for Zika/Aids/Cancer and Analyzing LHC Data for Crypto? Sign Me Up!
To add to @lukestokes's comment (if I may), you can use practically any hardware including mobile phones, R-Pis, etc. Of course, you will be able to contribute more with more powerful hardware.
For the difference between pool and solo 'mining', the payout for pool will actually be slightly lower as the pool takes a cut of your profits. The big benefits of a pool are getting set up in hours rather than days, a lot less can go wrong, and you will be paid out much more frequently (but less per payout).
Thanks Dutch! I got the impression you could use anything also, but I've noticed some projects (like LHC@home) wanted a ton of RAM while others talk about system requirements, GPUs, etc. It's all kind of a black box to me still. Are there some things which can only be run on specific hardware or is BOINC really designed to run on anything?
Great question actually! BOINC as a platform can run on any hardware, but individual projects have specific hardware requirements. Like you mentioned, some projects need a lot of RAM, but fortunately most don't. The most prominent split is between CPU and GPU projects. For example, SRBase only runs on CPUs, while the vast majority of Moowrap runs only on GPUs.
No matter the hardware (bar the super extreme), there will be a BOINC project you can contribute to. Hell, there are members of the Gridcoin community who have written entire articles on setting up a Raspberry Pi Gridcoin farm.
I saw some Pi articles in my research! Funny stuff to think about farming them.
Thanks again, Dutch!