*This is my second post here on volunteer computing. For a quick overview, read my first piece here.
When I talk or write about BOINC and volunteer computing I often face skepticism about the real impact of it. How can a PC or tiny Android phone really meaningfully contribute to scientific research, especially when academics have access to massive supercomputers that are multiple orders of magnitude more powerful than the devices mere mortals like us possess?
There are multiple parts to the answer to this question that I will summarize quickly before getting to the hard evidence of BOINC's success and it's immense potential if people like us get the word out.
"Why phones and PCs instead of just supercomputers?"
Supercomputers are expensive. Expensive to build, expensive to operate, and (often) expensive to get enough time on. Building a new top supercomputer could cost $400 million not to mention the costs of running and maintaining it.
The average academic doesn't have much money and spends a lot of their time chasing funding instead of doing actual research.
Our phones and computers spend much, if not most, of their lives powered on and relatively idle. Even when you are working on an email or Facebook post while streaming music, your computer is probably super bored, just wishing it had some cool asteroid trajectories, prime number analyses, or protein models to process.
Most people charge their phone and leave it on while they sleep, leaving it to twiddle its thumbs all night instead of pondering the origins of the galaxy or brainstorming solutions to childhood cancer.As I mentioned in the last post, a few hundred thousand computers have the equivalent computational power of a supercomputer (or several) when working on the right kind of task.
"I dunno about that, where is the proof?"
At last check, 40+ projects have contributed to knowledge in a wide range of fields and to 160+ academic articles, not to mention all the articles on BOINC itself.
Thanks to volunteer computing, thousands of candidates for improved solar cell materials have been identified, numerous very large prime numbers have been discovered, and projects on malaria, Zika, AIDS, and cancer have furthered our understanding of those diseases and how best to confront them.
"Ok, I get it. So what else could it do?"
All those accomplishments are due in part to a dedicated group of scientists, programmers , and a few hundred thousand volunteers.
There are well over a billion active android devices out there and billions of personal (and work, hint hint wink wink) computers in use that could run BOINC, which means right now BOINC has reached less than a tenth of one percent of it's potential!
Imagine how fast current projects could be finished if even 1 percent of eligible devices were helping out. Imagine what type and scale of projects could be tackled... and then let me tell you!
I emailed Dr. Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a chemistry professor who leads the Clean Energy Project, to ask what a larger volunteer force would mean to him. Here’s what he replied:
“My research group has huge hopes of understanding the entire molecular space, which is composed of 10^60 to 10^180 synthesizable molecules. So far, we have concentrated on the organic photovoltaics (‘plastic’ solar cells) area in collaboration with the World Community Grid. … If I were to have say a hundred times more volunteers, we could turn the project into the ‘Molecular Space Project’ and we could undertake a vast cataloging of a sample of a diverse set of molecules in chemical space to search for molecules with extreme properties for a variety of applications that could range from energy to technology and even health.”
Think about that and then come up with some other amazing ideas for things we could do and leave them in the comments!
Then go install BOINC, tell your family about BOINC, post on social media about BOINC (if you've already tried, try one more time), and then maybe help incentivize BOINC by getting into Gridcoin. Team Gridcoin (membership is currently a requirement to mine GRC) is the top team in terms of "Recent Average Credit" and is one of the top teams of all time with membership and computational output growing all the time!
Here is a link for BOINC at Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=edu.berkeley.boinc&hl=en
Here is a link for BOINC for computers:
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/
This could be your computer screen soon:
