I want to let you all know about what I think is one of the coolest yet most under-appreciated FOSS tools out there, it’s called BOINC lemmy at !boinc@sopuli.xyz . The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing has been around for decades and has delivered teraflops of computing to scientists on a daily basis for absolutely free.

BOINC has been used to map the universe, detect asteroids, search for aliens (remember seti@home?), fight cancer, and publish hundreds of scientific papers. The world’s largest particle accelerator (large hadron collider at CERN) even has a project you can compute for, who knows, you may find a new subatomic particle! Anybody with a computer, raspberry pi, or android can contribute their CPU or GPU to the cause and pick which projects they want to contribute to. You don’t need to be computer savvy or have a PhD to run it.

One of the awesome things about BOINC is that any scientists with interesting research can instantly access massive amounts of computational power for free. They don’t need time on a supercomputer or institutional backing, all they need is an interesting research concept and a spare laptop to run the server on.

I have been running BOINC for many years and find it very gratifying, I love getting to see the results. Hell, it even heats my house in the winter! If you have electric heat such as electric baseboards or space heaters (NOT heat pumps since they are >100% efficient), you can heat your house with computers and spend the exact same amount as your normal heat bill but also get science done in the process. Every watt of electricity you use in your house turns into heat. A blender is just as efficient at turning electricity into heat as a space heater. It sounds counter-intuitive, but ask your grade school physics teacher and you’ll find that the conservation of energy is not a controversial topic in physics. If you are spending 50W on a space heater, you could instead dump that 50W into your computer. You pay for and get 50W of heat either way, but only the computer does science along the way.

  • atlasraven31@lemm.ee
    3·
    9 months ago

    Buying an odroid for old school gaming but I could contribute when it’s not in use. It only uses 1.6W - 16W of power so it would not be a big deal to leave it running 24/7.

    | the computer does science along the way.

    sings I’m doing science and I’m still alive

    • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOP
      4·
      9 months ago

      Good news is that SBCs and Androids are some of the most efficient devices in terms of computational output per watt. I have a couple Android tablets I run BOINC on. Just make sure you keep an eye on temps, especially for androids where high temps will kill the battery. Mine all either have removable batteries or at least a removable back case so the heat can escape without going through the battery.

    • Peter1986C@beehaw.org
      3·
      9 months ago

      Not all BOINC project support the combination ARM+Linux (sometimes they only support the use of ARM with Android, or no ARM at all). Also, I do not know what stressing out the computer so much for prolonged time does to it over time. I am not saying to not do this, but please be aware of this.

      • atlasraven31@lemm.ee
        5·
        9 months ago

        Odroid is not all ARM (mine is but their latest is x86). I ran Seti@home on my old computer and it handled things fine. It went obsolete before it went kaput. RIP Phenom IIx4 and the Athlon64 that preceded it.

      • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOP
        3·
        9 months ago

        Luckily silicon and motherboards are incredibly durable. Go to any electronics recycling facility and you’ll find boards which have been around for 10+ years and still work but are no longer relevant. What you won’t find are many functional hard drives etc manufactured the same year.

        As long as you don’t have a ton of dust built up, every other component (your HDD, your OS, the laptops hinges, the power supply, etc) in your computer will fail before the silicon (on average) and the device will become obsolete before the silicon fails. No guarantee it happens that way, but on average this is how it tends to go. There are many people in the BOINC community who have been crunching on the same rigs 100% full throttle for a decade with no issues.

        SBCs tend to have decent heat exhaustion if you put a fan on them. Really the category where lifespan would start to be effected are laptops and androids, which really do not have sufficient heat exhaustion to run 100% even for a few minutes and where battery lifespan decreases significantly even for “medium” amounts of heat.