[p2p-research] Fwd: [ox-en] Volunteer computing with BOINC

[Chris Watkins]

I love the theory - not sure how well it's doing in practice.

A few years ago I installed a program that helped do calculations for
pharmaceutical research. But rather than using idle time as they promised,
it became a resource hog and greatly slowed down my computer when I was
trying to use it. I uninstalled it.

There needs to be a tool that such programs (and Google Desktop, which has
the same flaw on my computer) could incorporate to be unintrusive - like
instantly slowing down or stopping ("killing" if need be) the current
process when the keyboard is activated; detecting how much free RAM there is
and making sure there is always plenty for the the user's needs. (This
varies between systems I find, depending how well the operating system runs
- so there should be a default, but with the ability to vary how much RAM
etc the guest program is allowed to access.

Integrating with the power monitoring would be good, too, making sure it
doesn't prevent power-saving functions from activating. Switch off the
monitor and anything else not needed by the program. If I'm using a computer
at home, say, I'll pay for the extra electricity (green power) for a good
cause, but there's no need to pay for the monitor as well. That probably
should happen anyway, but on the Linux systems I've been using, power
management often doesn't do what it's supposed to.

Chris

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 03:22, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Stefan Merten <smerten at oekonux.de>
> Date: Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 8:32 PM
> Subject: [ox-en] Volunteer computing with BOINC
> To: list-en at oekonux.org
> Cc: Stefan Merten <smerten at oekonux.de>
>
>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Hi list!
>
> You may have heard of `SETI at home`_. Several years ago this project
> asked volunteers all over the Internet to donate their excess
> computing power to search for signals from extraterrestrial life
> forms.
>
> Today there is BOINC_ which makes such `volunteer computing`_ projects
> easy and gives them a common technical platform:
>
>  Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure
>  diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other
>  types of scientific research.
>
>  -- http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
>
> It supports a number of projects among them also supporting some
> experiments at the `Large Hadron Collider`_. Such projects are
> typically scientific projects which need lots and lots of computing
> power to calculate useful results but can not afford extremely
> expensive super-computers for this task.
>
> I'd consider volunteer computing another example of peer production.
> In this case expensive calculation results are created by donations
> from lots of peers.
>
> .. _volunteer computing:
> http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/VolunteerComputing
> .. _SETI at home: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
> .. _Large Hadron Collider: http://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/
> .. _BOINC: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
>
>
>                                                Grüße
>
>                                                Stefan
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-- 
Chris Watkins (a.k.a. Chriswaterguy)

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I like this: five.sentenc.es
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