I work at an open science NGO that has been approached by a developer who is interested in making a public portal !boinc@sopuli.xyz BOINC project. The basic idea is that scientific researchers could submit workunits for a number of popular science apps (molecular modeling etc) to be distributed and crunched by volunteers using BOINC. Essentially, a way for them to harness the petaflops of free processing power offered by the BOINC network without having to run their own BOINC server.

In order to make the proof-of-concept, we are looking for an science app which:

Is open source and runs on Linux
Has a large userbase
Has no way to get access to compute power for it for free or cheap without making your own HPC cluster or other work distribution system
Takes a long compute time and takes at least a couple hours to run on a standard consumer machine
Can have tasks split into smaller sub-tasks to be run on several machines

Bonus points for:

Tasks have a determinate output, meaning the results are the same for a given task no matter what kind of computer they are run on. This makes it easy to verify the work is done correctly by simply making sure two tasks have the same output.
App that is cross-discipline (applicable to multiple areas of science) or relevant to biology/health research

Any suggestions?

If you would be interested in helping with development for this project (Python/React, Remix (Vercel or Netlify)) let us know too

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[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Isn't this the same model as Folding @ Home? How did they accomplish it? Their model is great, here's a docker image, linux install, windows install, whatever you have and it'll just spin up

[–] the_sci@sopuli.xyz 5 points 7 months ago

BOINC and folding@home are similar in how they work in that they are both volunteer computing platforms. Folding@home is closed source, proprietary, run by a single research group, BOINC is open source and used by many different research groups working on various topics from health to astrophysics.

The idea here is to build a BOINC server where researchers can submit work to the server and get results without having to run their own BOINC server in the process.