Need scientific computing power for research? BOINC can get you teraFLOPS of it absolutely free!

For those unfamiliar with it, BOINC is the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing. It is a free software and volunteer computing infrastructure focused on science with over 15 active projects. There are teraflops of computing power available to you for absolutely free. If you are working on problems that can be done in a distributed or parallel matter, YSK about it.

The BOINC server software works with any app you have (such as a protein simulator), and can handle all the workunit creation/delivery/validation. You can run the server as a docker container and distribute your app as as pre-compiled binary or inside a virtualbox image to instantly work across platforms. BOINC not only supports 32 and 64-bit Windows/OS X/Linux hosts, but ARM and Android as well. And it supports GPU acceleration as well on both Nvidia and AMD cards. It's also open-source so you can modify it to suit your use case. For small projects, you can run the BOINC server on a $10/month VPS or a spare laptop in a closet for larger projects obviously the memory and storage needs will scale with complexity.

Once you have your server up (or beforehand, if you need to secure a guarantee of computation before investing development resources), you can approach Science United and Gridcoin for your guaranteed computation ("crunching"). Neither of these mechanisms require you to be affiliated with a university or other institution, they just require that you are doing interesting scientific research.

Science United is a platform run by the BOINC developers which connects volunteer computing participants to BOINC projects. Once they add you to their list, thousands of volunteers around the globe will immediately start crunching data for your project giving you many teraflops of power. Science United is particularly good for smaller projects which don't have large, ongoing workloads or have sporadic work.

Gridcoin is a cryptocurrency (founded 2013, not affiliated with the BOINC developers) which incentivizes people to crunch workunits for you. They currently incentivize most active BOINC projects (with their permission) and hand out approx $500 USD equivalent in incentivization money to your "crunchers" monthly. The actual value of the computation you receive is much higher than this. All of this happens without you ever needing to do anything aside from have a BOINC server. There are some requirements you must meet such as having a large amount of work to be done (be an ongoing project), but they can direct petaflops of power your way and have a procedure to "pre-approve" your project before it's done being developed.

BOINC can also be used to harvest under-utilized compute resources on your campus or in your company. It can be installed on platforms and set to compute only while the machine is idle, so it doesn't slow it down while in use.

Famous research institutes and major universities across the world use BOINC. World Community Grid, the Large Hadron Collider, Rosetta, University of Texas, and the University of California are a handful of the big names that use BOINC for work distribution.

Relevant links:

r/BOINC4Science has a nice researchers guide to BOINC

boincworkshop.org (Yearly BOINC conference with video presentations from many BOINC projects about how they use BOINC to process their data)

(Incomplete) List of Scientific Papers by BOINC projects

Happy to answer any questions folks have, I am involved in these communities have been "crunching" workunits for years.

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Need scientific computing power for research? BOINC can get you teraFLOPS of it absolutely free!

Need scientific computing power for research? BOINC can get you teraFLOPS of it absolutely free!