Open-source software for volunteer computing
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Open-source software for volunteer computing;
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What if some of the world's estimated 650 million PCs (and 250 million households with broadband Internet) could be linked to assist scientists in solving critical real world problems? This is exactly what humanitarian grid computing is about!
Donate your computer's idle CPU time to humanitarian non-profit scientific research projects. Help find cures for diseases like cancer, AIDS, diabetes, MS, Alzheimer, or help predict the earth's climate change, or advance science e.g. search for gravitational waves, help CERN build its latest particle accelerator or Berkeley search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So you WANT to contribute, but don't know where to start, or how to do it best? Or perhaps you're already contributing to one of the better-known projects, like SETI@Home or Folding@Home and looking for more?<....>
Note: Humanitarian grid computing landscape is changing rapidly, as new exciting projects arrive, others pause or discontinue etc. So, a lot of information out there on the Internet may be outdated, even if written 6-months ago. This document contains the latest info on DC computing as of May-2007 and everything presented here has been checked to the best of my ability.
~So - You happen to find this type of software installed in your network. What should the proper response be for it's installation, and how do you manage it? While it's voluntary to participate, is it not somewhat close to 'theft of business resources' if installed in a office environment?
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I did this in the 90's for SETI.
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@gjacobse said in Open-source software for volunteer computing:
Open-source software for volunteer computing;
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What if some of the world's estimated 650 million PCs (and 250 million households with broadband Internet) could be linked to assist scientists in solving critical real world problems? This is exactly what humanitarian grid computing is about!
Donate your computer's idle CPU time to humanitarian non-profit scientific research projects. Help find cures for diseases like cancer, AIDS, diabetes, MS, Alzheimer, or help predict the earth's climate change, or advance science e.g. search for gravitational waves, help CERN build its latest particle accelerator or Berkeley search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So you WANT to contribute, but don't know where to start, or how to do it best? Or perhaps you're already contributing to one of the better-known projects, like SETI@Home or Folding@Home and looking for more?<....>
Note: Humanitarian grid computing landscape is changing rapidly, as new exciting projects arrive, others pause or discontinue etc. So, a lot of information out there on the Internet may be outdated, even if written 6-months ago. This document contains the latest info on DC computing as of May-2007 and everything presented here has been checked to the best of my ability.
`So - You happen to find this type of software installed in your network. What should the proper response be for it's installation, and how do you manage it? While it's voluntary to participate, is it not somewhat close to 'theft of business resources' if installed in a office environment?
I think that would depend a lot on the office culture. In an SMB, I would tend to agree with you that it may well be considered theft of sources, but it could also lead to data breaches, etc. I ran a small business for a few years and had a bunch computers running together in my Pop's team with SETI... But we knew it was running and what it was doing.
I could see some places -- especially schools -- wanting to have this running in their Science department, etc, or even in their computer programming department to see how parallel computing works.
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To some degree I see it being okay to do. A business has a ISP connection of 50/20,.. and generally no limit on total data. And idle computers are just that idle, if they are on, they are the same cost to run idle or in use.
However, I can see it being similar to Streaming Music - So many company policy prevent this as it reduces the capacity of the network.....
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@gjacobse said in Open-source software for volunteer computing:
To some degree I see it being okay to do. A business has a ISP connection of 50/20,.. and generally no limit on total data. And idle computers are just that idle, if they are on, they are the same cost to run idle or in use.
However, I can see it being similar to Streaming Music - So many company policy prevent this as it reduces the capacity of the network.....
True. It probably depends on the software too... IIRC, SETI@Home didn't use a lot of bandwidth, but it did use some to download the next round of data, and upload the results of what it (did not find) found in the previous batch of data.
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I have been a BOINC user since 1998; started using seti@home my freshman year using an old compaq laptop with win95 on it. I now run 3 projects on my home network, seti@home, milkway@home, and Atlas@home, they run on my main pc (4930k and 32gb ram, amd r9 290) as well as an amd hexcore system that is much slower.
Ive only used it in an office environment once, at my last job when we got some new killer (at the time)hardware. Loaded up boinc/seti on dual proc dell server with 256GB ram, for 'testing' to make sure it could run at full load for periods of time. It was also fun to see how many work units it could do. My boss said 1 day was enough, so i uninstalled it.
These distributed computing tasks dont use much bandwidth, but they will run your cpu at max, and some of them eat up RAM (Atlas@home is one). There are settings to control all that.
However, running these on work systems is using company resources for personal stuff, unless your boss is huge into distributed computing and science and wants spare cpu cycles spent that way(havent met one yet that does),
