Version vom 26. Oktober 2014, 17:47 Uhr

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Donating your idle computer time to a good cause

I have been feeling altruist again, so I thought I could donate my spare computing power to some scientific project with a laudable goal.

I have tried the BOINC platform in the past and got disappointed, and this time was no different, except that I decided to write an article about it.

Is it worth contributing now?

Probably not.

Computing power is still exponentially increasing all the time, and most importantly, efficiency is still increasing at a great rate. That means that you are constantly getting more processing speed for less money and with a lower electricity consumption. Therefore, year 2014 is not the most efficient point in time to get started, at least if you consider the current environmental impact of producing energy.

Contributing now helps some project of your choice be the first to achieve its goals. Being the first does have some value, especially for the researcher. For some biological projects, having the results earlier could mean new treatments are available faster, which may be crucial for potential patients. However, this kind of computing-intensive projects are becoming easier all the time, so getting there is just a matter of time.

An increasing number of contributors should raise the general perception that distributed computing is important, which should make funding platform software improvements easier. However, it does not look like BOINC has been improving much in the past years (see below for more information on this). Therefore, participating now probably does not make a difference anymore, at least for that platform.

At a personal level, contributing is going to cost you some time. You will have to install software, choose a worthy project, create an account somewhere (yet another password to remember), and maybe ask your employer for permission first. You will have to learn a new program and, at least when using a PC, deal with the quirks described below. And there is also the increased electricity bill.

Does it make sense to use volunteered distributed computing?

This is a human organisational issue. For most projects, the most economical solution at a global level would be to design hardware specifically for the task at hand. This does not have to be completely new hardware (ASICs), as FPGAs will often suffice.

Even if a project uses commodity hardware, a centralised computing centre that buys CPUs (or graphics cards with computational functions) in bulk will probably achieve a much better value for money overall, especially regarding the electricity consumption. With the advent of cloud computing, this is getting easier and cheaper all the time.

The problem is getting the necessary funding. Society does not think as a whole, but each nation, goverment, institution and so on has a separate budget. Using volunteered processing power may help an individual project overcome funding difficulties. It is probably not efficient in global terms, but it does get the job done. After all, there is no good solution in sight for this kind of organisational problem.

Choosing your good cause

There are many projects available on the BOINC platform, but little help about choosing one. The website only mentions what hardware and software platforms a project can run on, which falls short in my opinion.

You will be giving your processing time for free, so I would choose a project that makes its computing results public. I would also favour those projects with open source computing software. Finally, I would also favor non-profit institutions.

For example, the Folding@home project run by the Stanford University states in their FAQ page "following the publications of these scientific articles, we will make the raw data of the folding runs will be available to other researchers upon request" [sic]. They also have a "Why don’t you post the source code?" FAQ entry which states "we stress that the vast majority of our code is already open source". Personally, I would expect all data to be public for everybody to use freely and all the code to be open-sourced from the start. Therefore, I would NOT choose a project with such restrictions.

If a project is listed in BOINC, it probably has passed some selection criteria, so it should be trustworthy. This is important, because you will be installing a managament software on your PC that automatically downloads binary executables from the Internet.

There are of course other distributed computing projects that do not use the BOINC infrastructure. In fact, Folding@home is one of them.

I went for SETI@home, which is what got BOINC started. It may not be the best use of your computing time though.

TODO

TODO: Write the rest of the article.