Berkeley has this really cool program called BOINC that you can download and donate your computer’s resources to processing scientific data. There are a bunch of projects to pick, from working on climate change, to cancer, to the Large Hadron Collider.
The good folks at linuxserver.io even have a ready to go Docker container for easy setup: https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/boinc
Another possibility is running the Archive Team’s Warrior, which downloads data from at risk web sites and uploads them to the Internet Archive: https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveTeam_Warrior
Does anyone else have examples of projects like this? My dream is for the Fediverse to have this sort of feature eventually.
What do you mean by “spare”? Modern CPUs scale their electricity usage according to utilisation.
One would assume they mean sitting around, doing nothing. Some would rather use some electricity to support a good cause than have the computing power sit there idle.
would rather use some electricity to support a good cause than have the computing power sit there idle.
That’s not “spare” though. That’s my point.
I mean yeah, but no. It is spare capacity, so it’s spare in one way.
I have hundreds of gigaflops of computing power sitting idle 80% of the time, I just don’t think the taxpayers would appreciate the power bill if I put it all to use like that. But at home I can spare a few cycles on my solar power sipping Proxmox cluster.
I use a VPS. They don’t charge based on CPU utilization so I run Folding@Home on it.
Please only do this on plans with a dedicated vCPU that isn’t shared with other users.
I’ve participated in their SETI and cancer research projects in the past. It’s a good cause, and I don’t mind making a donation.
I did think the BOINC project was shut down, though. Good to know it’s still going.
My very cursory understanding is that SETI was shutting down, but BOINC (so folding etc) should still be going.
Now I know this is being done with encryption, but an open tunnel direct to your non dmz-ed system, is just begging to be hacked, and it will be, without a shadow of doubt.
As far as I know, the BOINC client just pulls down new data for processing when each batch of work is done. There’s no pushing and no open tunnel or port. The software risk would be malicious code in a particular project (e.g. if it said it was folding proteins but actually mined bitcoins). I hope there’s some vetting of project code.
The other risk is hardware (especially CPU and RAM) running its lifetime down more quickly because of the continual heavier usage.
