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BOINC: aka how to do something good with your pc when idle

Posted: 19 Dec 2008, 09:06
by BrainDamage
Perhaps someone here already heard about BOINC, or seti@home, then this post is not for you :P

I stumbled upon the BOINC project, it's a distributed computing platform where everybody can volunteer by installing the software.
Basically you install the program (client) in your pc and your computer will start performing tasks when idle, you can subscribe to projects trough the management GUI to chose what project to lend the pc ( you can chose more than one ), most ( if not all ) the projects have philanthropic goals such as researching new types of medicines or elaborate physics data.

Since I quite like the idea I though I'd post here to try to get some others to get involved as well, it's quite easy to install & get it running, also the software can run on Linux, mac, win, BSD, etc...

some projects using BOINC you might wanna check out:

http://docking.cis.udel.edu/
http://boinc.gorlaeus.net/
http://lhcathome.cern.ch/
http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

and ofc again the main project link:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Re: BOINC: aka how to do something good with your pc when idle

Posted: 19 Dec 2008, 11:40
by koshi
I sometimes run BOINC on some uni workstations: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/hosts_us ... id=8938165

Re: BOINC: aka how to do something good with your pc when idle

Posted: 19 Dec 2008, 17:30
by CarRepairer
Why are there never any distributed computing projects working toward evil goals, such as discovering the ultimate airborne biovirus or analyzing data to hack into spring and using peet's account to unban everyone, that sort of thing?

Re: BOINC: aka how to do something good with your pc when idle

Posted: 19 Dec 2008, 20:54
by BaNa
CarRepairer wrote:Why are there never any distributed computing projects working toward evil goals, such as discovering the ultimate airborne biovirus or analyzing data to hack into spring and using peet's account to unban everyone, that sort of thing?
people who would be into that kind of thing spend their time photoshopping dicks onto every picture in the intertube.

Re: BOINC: aka how to do something good with your pc when idle

Posted: 19 Dec 2008, 21:12
by Panda
CarRepairer wrote: hack into spring and using peet's account to unban everyone
:P Because peet is a pretty banner.

Re: BOINC: aka how to do something good with your pc when idle

Posted: 19 Dec 2008, 22:00
by 1v0ry_k1ng
it would be like the bit on ghostbusters where all the ghosts escape the vault

Re: BOINC: aka how to do something good with your pc when idle

Posted: 20 Dec 2008, 07:18
by BrainDamage
CarRepairer wrote:Why are there never any distributed computing projects working toward evil goals, such as discovering the ultimate airborne biovirus
we don't need to duplicate efforts, governments military labs are already working pretty hard on this one... and they can already crack peet's account within minutes :P

Re: BOINC: aka how to do something good with your pc when idle

Posted: 20 Dec 2008, 10:22
by Dragon45
knew there was a reason i still troll around here

nice find, thank goodness i didn't have to reinvent the wheel on this one...