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

The Computation Moonshot is a competition for high schools which encourages students to learn about data science, computer science, distributed computing, and a wide array of fields in science by having them contribute to real, useful outcomes for researchers in an exciting competitive atmosphere. We utilize the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing !boinc@sopuli.xyz to connect students to groundbreaking scientific research projects around the world. This year we are running on the World Community Grid project which studies, among other topics: climate science, genetics, cancer, and tuberculosis. We call processing data for these research projects “crunching”.

Our goal in 2024 is to reach 50,000 donated hours of computation to research.

The competition is free to all and requires no special knowledge or skills. We provide setup guides for teachers and students, along with educational resources on the research to which your computers are contributing.

Compete for over $6,000 in prizes for schools and students, all while doing science!

More information on the competition, including how to register your high school, can be found at https://computationmoonshot.org/

World Community Grid is a volunteer computing project where people can donate their computer's spare computational power to science (similar to folding@home). This week they announced some results of their research and having passed the 800,000 CPU-year mark which is pretty incredible.

Previous discoveries from WCG have included new cancer markers for lung cancer, new candidates for high-efficiency materials for solar panels, and more.

SCI is proud to release a suite of business cards, flyers, and other promotional materials to help promote BOINC and its awesome projects.

There is a business card for each project, along with some general BOINC promotional materials available in our Github Repository. These are openly licensed so you are free to print your own, modify them to suit your needs, and distribute them however and wherever you'd like.

Repo link: https://github.com/TheSCInitiative/BOINC-Promotion-and-Flyers/tree/main/cards

The cards contain a link and QR code which redirects to each project's website. The links are redirected through SCI's site so we can measure the impact these cards are making and see how many redirects we're getting.

If you know of any other publicly-available promotional materials for BOINC, please let us know so we can add them to our repo.

PS We reached out to each project for feedback on what they'd like to see on the cards but many projects did not respond. If you are a project admin who would like some of the text on your card changed or have any questions please contact contact{at}thesciencecommons.org. Thanks!