5 ms·
Boinc on old hardware will win you quite the electric bill. Are they sharing the profits from these discoveries with the contributors? No of course not, that's
by underlogic 3y ago
Boinc on old hardware will win you quite the electric bill. Are they sharing the profits from these discoveries with the contributors? No of course not, that's their IP. You let them use your hardware, pay for the power and bandwidth and they run laughing to the bank. "Boinc - Free supercomputing from the stupid"
- fbhabbed 3y agoIt depends on the project, of course. Speaking for Einstein@home, for example, all their research is public and you also get a mention in their paper if a result was in your workunit.
- huuhee3 3y agoPrice doesn't matter if you were going to use that electricity for heating anyway. Mostly the project are run by universities funded by tax payers, and don't exist to make any profit. Ever heard of charity?
- beardog 3y agoYou can also recoup some of the cost by attaching your Boinc to Gridcoin: https://gridcoin.us/ https://gridcoin.us/
- adastra22 3y agoHeat pumps would be more efficient than resistive heating in silicon circuits.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoBut they don’t find aliens or fold proteins at the same time.
- FerretFred 3y agoYeah!! My one worthwhile box consumes 300 watts, and I made the mistake of folding covid-19 proteins for Boinc in the summer of '19. It was like a sauna in my office and the bill was eye-watering. Never again...
- jonathrg 3y agoSummer of '19 is impressively early to be working on COVID-19 research.
- adastra22 3y agoIt was bioweapons design research /s
- FerretFred 3y agoDuh! Brain not working together with fingers... how about the summer of 20
- Nonoyesnoyes 3y agoDon't talk it down just because you don't like it and you are cheap I did Rosetta for years and I was fully aware what and why I was supporting it...
- ramon156 3y ago"because you are cheap" What a weird take.
- ang_cire 3y agoExpecting a monetary benefit from a BOINC project is the weird take.
- underlogic 3y agoLook if they want funding for their for profit venture they should just ask for your credit card number then go spend on AWS where the hardware is modern and the energy is efficiently used. But if they were upfront and asked directly for peoples hard earned money in exchange for nothing every sane human would say no, so there's this racket called boinc where they trick you into giving them your money indirectly and they laugh at you. You get a gold star if they find something with your "contribution". But they get a billion dollars for finding the next lucrative drug
- adastra22 3y agoThis isn't pharmaceutical research.
- underlogic 3y agoprotein folding simulation is to find drug targets
- Rayston 3y agonot all (or even most) of them are profit ventures, like at all. There are some along those lines. I do Asteroids at home, they need help figuring out the shape and size of asteroids. The data is published for public use.
- Rayston 3y ago??? For the majority of boinc projects its just citizen science, they results are published for free. No money is involved. I donate my computer time (and corresponding electricity costs) to projects I believe in or find interesting.
- agilob 3y agoDude above said "electric bill", compute on older hardware is expensive. Modern hardware will be considered expensive in a few years too.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoTrue when they discover aliens and sign exclusive mutual trade agreements you’ll be kicking yourself for not getting a cut of that. But at least they’ll be teleporting faster than light with alien tech laughing to the bank!
- tomComb 3y agoIn my province electricity is $0.024 / kWh overnight (that's about $0.17 USD) so almost free and comes from almost entirely renewable sources. So, I would be happy to run it every night (excepting July & August), but the BOINC Manager just didn't seem to work for me: created an account but then the account was not recognized.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoIf 8/10ths of your grid's energy is renewable with renewables maxxed out and the remainder coming from non-renewables, your energy use was 100% non-renewable because that non-renewable capacity would not have been necessary.