BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing)

Project details

Project description (max 200 words): A very simple way to help The Zeitgeist Movement effortlessly is to free up some of your computer’s computing power for scientific research. This is possible with the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) program in the TZM BOINC Project. When the screensaver of your computer is activated BOINC will start with calculations. You can also set the program to constantly perform calculations regardless of the idle state (screensaver). You can limit this consumption so that you have some left over for your own computer use.

The Zeitgeist Movement has a team on most scientific projects. If you join, make sure to join the team “The Zeitgeist Movement”. The credits that you then receive are then added to the team of the Zeitgeist Movement. In this way we come into the spotlight in the scientific world.

The recommended project to join is Rosetta@home. This is a non-profit project and needs help identifying the three dimensional shapes of proteins. The simulations for this are very complex and therefore require a lot of computing power. By using BOINC you contribute to research that can eventually lead to finding treatments for a number of serious diseases such as HIV, malaria, cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Your personal background within the context of the project: No (IT) skills are really needed for this project. I can assist you with the setup if needed.
Estimated timeline in terms of time boxed deliverables: This one goes against the nature of projects, it’s a never ending one. New projects will always need more computing power.
Resources needed or already arranged: You can use your phone, laptop, tablet, etc.

I decided to run BOINC on the tzmc1 server as well. This is the server where this forum and Jitsi runs on. It uses the BOINC Account Manager (BAM) with resource profiles. So if e.g. more than 33% of CPU resources are used by other processes, then BOINC goes into an idle state. Things like that. Also quotas have been setup for disk and memory usage.

But in any case, if the server seems slower than usual. Let me know. Then I’ll fine tune it a bit. But now when the server is not used by us, it’s still being useful :slight_smile: