BOINC4Science

The Computation Moonshot is a competition for high schools which encourages students to learn about data science, computer science, distributed computing, and a wide array of fields in science by having them contribute to real, useful outcomes for researchers in an exciting competitive atmosphere. We utilize the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) to connect students to groundbreaking scientific research projects around the world. This year we are running on the World Community Grid project which studies, among other topics: climate science, genetics, cancer, and tuberculosis. We call processing data for these research projects “crunching”.

Our goal in 2024 is to reach 50,000 donated hours of computation to research.

The competition is free to all and requires no special knowledge or skills. We provide setup guides for teachers and students, along with educational resources on the research to which your computers are contributing.

Compete for over $6,000 in prizes for schools and students, all while doing science!

Get this out to any high schools, teachers, or students you know of that might be interested in participating!

More information on the competition, including how to register your high school, can be found at https://computationmoonshot.org/

The AI Horde is a FOSS, crowdsourced cluster for Stable Diffusion and LLMs. We've been running for more than a year now!

This version fixes a problem that causes GPU apps to fail after a MacOS upgrade to Sonoma: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/pull/5502 Download it here: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php

📣 It's a new year! That means new BOINC Census results! 📊

Check out what the community said about BOINC in 2023 👉 https://thesciencecommons.org/BOINC/Census/2023/

Welcome to the New Year everyone, this also means we have new BOINC Census results for the survey conducted in late 2023.

You can find the results here: https://thesciencecommons.org/BOINC/Census/2023/

Feel free to comment on the results in this post or share your thoughts in the official BOINC discord/telegram or wherever you connect with the network.

from: https://universeathome.pl/universe/forum_thread.php?id=738 I met Krzysztof in the summer of 2014. It was then that Grzegorz Wiktorowicz found me and invited me to collaborate on a new scientific project. The reason they found me on the Internet was a problem with accessing the necessary computing power needed for the scientific research of these two scientists. Soon after, the test server for the Universe@Home project was created - some of you may still remember it.

As soon as it turned out that the idea of using BOINC was a bullseye, Krzysztof offered me a more permanent collaboration, which I undertook with joy. Few of us have the opportunity to work with scientists of this caliber.

We worked together for almost 10 years. About a month ago, we were discussing development possibilities, and Krzysztof was telling me about the publications being created based on our joint work (yes, there were supposed to be more than one!).

Unfortunately, today we will no longer be able to implement these plans...

As Krzysztof was a founder of the project, I don’t know yet what will happen next with our project. It's too early for any decisions, but whatever they may be - you will find out immediately. Krzysztof never forgot to mention the help our community provided him, and I am sure that we too will remember his trust in the power of the community...

from https://www.sidock.si/sidock/forum_thread.php?id=263 We've successfully achieved 21 milestones in our ongoing drug discovery initiative, and this strong, open, and community-supported drug discovery project is going on. Our research has been routine lately: virtual screening on the same library for a pleiade of corona-related targets. These efforts are however crucial to our research progression. Currently, we're in the process of drafting publications for two of our completed objectives (3CLpro and PLpro) and are setting the stage for upcoming drug targets (here we are also planning a pool where You the participants, will help us decide on the upcoming target work). Last but not least, we thank everyone who has donated cryptocurrency or money. The donations sum up to 639 Euro and 12,140 Gridcoin now. We plan to use them for purchase of compounds and in-vitro screening. As always, we are grateful to all of you for your computational contributions and discussions!

We look forward to the future work on SiDock@home.

Merry Christmas to all and all the best to All!

With best wishes, Natalia, Marko, Črtomir and hoarfrost

Reminder: If you have not filled out the BOINC census, time is running out! Stand up and be counted! You will not be asked for any personally-identifiable information and your response can help shape the future of BOINC. https://forms.fillout.com/t/n33grsgkeRus

The BOINC Census is back for another year! 🎉

If you use BOINC, we want to hear your thoughts! Take the survey with the link below 👇

Should only take 5 min and your response could help shape the future of the community 😁

https://forms.fillout.com/t/n33grsgkeRus

The BOINC Census is a project of the Science Commons Initiative, a 501(c)(3) non-profit rebuilding the bridge of trust and participation between the public and science.

Happy crunching! 🚀

The 7.24.1 version of the BOINC client software has been released for Windows, Mac, and Android. Download it here. Release notes are here. Thanks to everyone who contributed to developing and testing this release.

FindTheMag is a powerful tool which for getting stats from your BOINC client. It is open source and runs on Linux/MacOS/Windows. This version is pretty much a top-down rewrite of all the code.

It will show you things like credit/hr for each project, which can be helpful for figuring out which of your crunching rigs is most efficient at which project. You can also use it to resume/suspend BOINC based on room temperature. This tool is mainly used by Gridcoin crunchers to find the most profitable project, but even if you just use BOINC it's a good stats tool to have in your arsenal.

This new release comes with a number of enhancements and all existing users are encouraged to upgrade.

Changes:

• Massive stability improvements, particularly when communicating with BOINC client. This should eliminate pretty much every crash condition encountered by FTM 2 users.
• Fix a number of bugs in stats calculation and output
• Table printed to user is now more useful and you can customize various aspects of it

SCI is proud to release a suite of business cards, flyers, and other promotional materials to help promote BOINC and its awesome projects.

There is a business card for each project, along with some general BOINC promotional materials available in our Github Repository. These are openly licensed so you are free to print your own, modify them to suit your needs, and distribute them however and wherever you'd like.

Repo link: https://github.com/TheSCInitiative/BOINC-Promotion-and-Flyers/tree/main/cards

The cards contain a link and QR code which redirects to each project's website. The links are redirected through SCI's site so we can measure the impact these cards are making and see how many redirects we're getting.

If you know of any other publicly-available promotional materials for BOINC, please let us know so we can add them to our repo.

PS We reached out to each project for feedback on what they'd like to see on the cards but many projects did not respond. If you are a project admin who would like some of the text on your card changed or have any questions please contact contact{at}thesciencecommons.org. Thanks!

The 7.24.1 version of the BOINC client software has been released for Windows, OSX, and Android. Download it here: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php.

Release notes:

• improve implementation of CPU throttling
• the default value for the "suspend_if_no_recent_input" pref is 0, not 60
• if sched request fails, show the scheduler URL (that might be the problem)
• Show alert if idle time to resume computing is greater than idle time to suspend computing
• ignore old prefs sent by projects or AM
• avoid overscheduling CPUs in presence of MT jobs
• Manager: computing prefs dialog bug
• Manager: Add button in event log to display only alerts (errors)
• Manager: Improve consistency of control labels and accelerators
• Manager: Show native names for language options, and only those for which translations are available
• Android: if suspend because of battery heat or charge, don't resume for at least 5 minutes.
• Mac: Support Dark Mode in Advanced View
• Mac: Add standard command-comma shortcut for Preferences menu item

Ramanujan Machine is a project using the computers of volunteers to answer some of these questions (using the BOINC platform). Anybody can participate, please see their website for more information. Related paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.11829

Sidock@home is an international volunteer computing project aimed at drug discovery. The first mission of the project is discovery of possible drugs against the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It uses the BOINC framework to distribute the large computational load.

from Vitalii (BOINC Dev) to the BOINC Network discord:

Is there anybody who currently has Android device that: runs on Android 8 or 9 or 10 or 11 or 12 has Mali GPU or Adreno GPU

Please DM me, I'd like to run some tests to make better support of GPUs on these devices (yes, I know that there are no projects that currently run on Android GPUs, but if we don't fix this feature they will definitely never appear).

Thank you in advance.