The Future of BOINC

[Dataman]

Dr Anderson is moving away from BOINC to do other things and it is unclear if anyone is going to continue its development. I urge each of you to read his retrospective and comment.

https://continuum-hypothesis.com/boinc_history.php

Sadly, BOINC was a great idea which has never lived up to its potential for many reasons. There are few projects left which actually do "real science". What little participants are left are groups of gridcoin miners and teams which produce "challenges" which are little more than DDOS attacks against servers.

Me? I will continue to support Einstein, Universe and LHC but on a very limited basis. I cannot justify more than that.

I would like you hear your thoughts on the paper and your plans for the future.

Dataman

[Mick Lindsay]

Well after reading the article, I have been living with blinkers on. I thought I was doing great work for the science community, started of like most with SETI@home and was proud of my achievement certificates. Then went on to RNA World I think I rose up to about number 10 in the world - pretty good with my small farm, over the last couple of years I've concentrated on WCG.

As BOINC seems to be on the wain I'm not sure how I can now convince my other half that I need a new computer every couple of years because it is too slow for "computing for science". I guess that I will wait to see if WCG comes back up and works under the new framework. Hopefully onward and upward. 

[Dingo]

I have been going off BOINC for a while and have tried to get the Team interested in Challenges etc but it is a lost cause.  The same 10-20 people participate in the challenges.

I will keep the Team going by creating a Team on new projects, and paying for the Domain Namin and Hosting but will not be doing much of anything else.  OH I will try and keep the projects on the forum up to date as to active and inactive.

I will still be crunching when I can though.  I have been doing it now since 1999, that's longer than my marriages,  and it is now part of my life and it keeps my brain active.

[Mike Mitchell]

I would have liked Boinc to have distributed the credits based on their own calculations and algorithm. With projects returning very basic raw data to them, thus keeping the internet costs down, and Boinc distributing a, hopefully, a more equitable total of credit.


I'll probably stick with it at some level until it finishes as well.

[jave808]

I will continue with BOINC until the end. It's a shame that its development is ending, but there you go. One would of thought that volunteer computing would continue to be all the rage, but this article dictates otherwise.

[tazzduke]

Dave is ending his adventure with BOINC, but there are still others that are involved in the background that will continue with BOINC development.

It is a really interesting read, but only 1 persons perspective, but also highlights, the things they got right and also the things they go wrong and corrected.

One of the many that are still involved is Richard Haselgrove, many of you may know him from Seti@Home, or the BOINC Dev Forums.

Currently they are working on version 7.20 of BOINC.

Cheers

[NudgeyNR]

I have been crunching since the start of SETI.

I to will be running BOINC until there seems no point any longer.

[Daniel]

That was a really interesting article.

I think that even if BOINC hasn't lived up to his expectations, it is still a great achievement.
I don't feel discouraged at all by what he said.
If anything, I feel more motivated to continue than I did before.

There are a lot more projects to choose from now than when I first started, and I think that the teams, stats and competitions have made things even more interesting.

I am going to continue crunching.

[chooka03]

I haven't read the link yet but the ever increasing costs of crunching is leading me to reduce my pc's & power bill..
I'd rather stick with projects that seem to have some benefit. I got started on BOINC because my uncle in law found a neutron star and received a certificate from Einstein@Home.
I like LHC, Einstein, primegrid but I'm a bit unsure about the other projects as they don't really seem to give much feedback.
Maybe Univerrse@Home is still ok. Not sure about Cosmology, YAFU, Numberfields, Milkyway (one of my old favourites) NFS etc. Even WCG & Rosetta I'm having my doubts over. Rosetta is just rubbish having to use a VM and a ton of memory.

My family finances would certainly improve if BOINC/crunching came to an end :(

I'll keep going until the end :)