I started doing this with SETI@Home. And have continued to run these sorts of programs on my computers ever since. SETI@Home used BOINC, which is still used by other projects. I also use World Community Grid. Highly recommend!!
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2024
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I currently have tasks qued/being worked on, from World Community Grid, yoyo@home, and Rosetta@home.
I just started running tasks for yoyo[@home, and by golly. These tasks are freaking HUGE! The shortest task estimate is 2 days, and 18 hours.
Rosetta@home offered up tasks that took me more than a day for most, to be completed.
World Community Grid has been the best in completing tasks and not taking more than a day to finish. The longest estimated time to completion has been under 9 hours.
I'm placed top 4% for FaH
Close! I am in the top 5%. I had it running all the time.
I should start again.
I miss Folding@Home with Playstation 3.
This time of year I take the computer running my home NAS and move it to my bedroom and set up BOINC. Literally keeps the room 7-10 degrees (F) warmer.
It's also about the same electric-to-thermal efficiency as a regular space heater, so if that's how you heat, there's no reason not to.
Unless of course you have a heat pump (or an A/C with a reversing valve, which is the same thing). Which by all means please use that instead. You're not going to top a heat pump in terms of efficiency. We're talking 300% efficient heat production minimum. Best you can hope for with electric heating is 100%.
Well then you have me, I waited until winter to rip my DVD collection to my NAS, because if I was going to spend several weeks with 2 or 3 PCs blasting at 100% CPU, I might as well wait until it's furnace season rather than air conditioner season.
Even if you have a heat pump, the PCs efficiency does not change compared to a space heater. The heat pump existing does not change this.
Well obviously. The point I'm making is that you shouldn't just use your PC to heat your home unless you're already using it as a PC simultaneously.
Pretty sure it's 100% efficient (100% energy consumed is emitted as heat) meaning it's exactly as efficient as a space heater. Only way to get more efficient is a heat pump.
They're all kind of old, though. Most of the active ones seem like 5-10 years old. Are there any recent new projects?
And are the projects from like 2009 still feasable? I mean both argorithms and compute hardware in the datacenters of those universities may have made leaps forwards since then?
I mean, during COVID, the folding@home network was the most powerful 'datacentre' in the world by quite a margin.
Home computing leaps almost as fast as the data centres do.
Wow, I didn't know. First exaFLOP computing system... I tried looking up more but that seems complicated. I'm missing some graph with the TFLOPs over time. Only thing I found is some old one from 2012. Do you happen to know if the participants get in return any list of what their contribution achieved? I mean it'd be nice to know what kinds of scientific papers were written about Covid, with help of that massive compute capacity.
They list the papers here (there may be more not listed). See how many more there are in 2021!
That's a good question.
From what I've gathered from my recent experience of running tasks, the project might have started years ago, but they are still offering tasks to be completed.
Einstein@Home does pulsar and (continuous) gravitational wave research. They have some long-running pulsar projects, which still find new pulsars getting published, and continuous gravitational wave research usually has a new project every 6-12 months.
The algorithms are improving all the time, and so do the volunteer computers.
I wonder how much of this is because of crypto. Option to get paid appears, and donations go down.
This is really cool.
Which of these make their data publically available?
Because the greatest scientific contribution would not be hording the data so you can publish your paper, but making it freely available, so any group of researchers can look through it and contribute to scientific knowledge by analysing the findings in different ways
There's also a list here, though last updated in 2020: https://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html
Most of those projects remain active in some form.
I was going to mention ArchiveTeam's warrior because I thought it wouldn't be listed, since computing isn't really the important thing you're donating, more your virgin IP address and internet connection... but it's third on the list!
How much does it spam, if I run it am I likely to get ip banned anywhere?
...Or in trouble for 'visiting' unsavoury sites?
There are always several projects to choose from.
The URLs project plays it fast and loose and archives an assortment of random URLs. This one has an IP block warning.
Some have NSFW warnings.
Other projects aim to archive a single site as accurately as possible (possibly with a deadline when the site is shutting down), so they can't afford to have their warriors blocked or rate limited. If you are, that would be because of an issue. You can choose to archive sites you don't want to visit to avoid issues.
Ah, I thought it was just a monolithic app you set going and have no control over. Ty
np. Right now you could set it to ask.fm (shuts down dec 1.). Zero IP blocking or rate limiting. Puts your machine to good use.
Not all projects listed in the warrior are actually active. Check out https://tracker.archiveteam.org/ for all the current projects and see if the one you want to archive is actually active (has people receiving and sending in items)
Just limit it to one job per session.
I ran 3 continuous jobs while archiving reddit and could still connect without issue.
Finally something I am participating in ;)
OONI monitors internet censorship and other forms of network interference, especially by state actors, worldwide. It's an important contributor to digital rights and freedoms IMO, and you can run their client in the background to contribute non-personal data on pretty much any device.
They also make great pizza ovens
I used to have this docker image for Archive Team running. I've helped archive a hundred gigabytes or so of reddit data. After a couple reset of my home server, I don't have it running right now.