I’m placed top 4% for FaH
This time of year I take the computer running my home NAS and move it to my bedroom and set up BOINC. Literally keeps the room 7-10 degrees (F) warmer.
It’s also about the same electric-to-thermal efficiency as a regular space heater, so if that’s how you heat, there’s no reason not to.
There’s also a list here, though last updated in 2020: https://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html
Most of those projects remain active in some form.
I started doing this with SETI@Home. And have continued to run these sorts of programs on my computers ever since. SETI@Home used BOINC, which is still used by other projects. I also use World Community Grid. Highly recommend!!
I was going to mention ArchiveTeam’s warrior because I thought it wouldn’t be listed, since computing isn’t really the important thing you’re donating, more your virgin IP address and internet connection… but it’s third on the list!
I prefer bitcoin. You’re doing a lot of great work helping society get rid of those awful financial institutions by verifying transactions.
It uses much less energy too
Bitcoin uses less energy? Now that’s something I haven’t heard of before.
Yep. Theres a lot of misinformation due to bank lobbys propaganda. Bitcoin was designed to be more efficient.
It doesn’t need humans to deal with transaction reversals (this was a key part of the design per the white paper), so you cut out all the energy that goes into creating buildings for offices and maintaining them. Also it scales up without using additional energy, so if you actually look at the numbers it uses magnitudes less energy.
This is just silly. If you had said Etherium, then maybe. But Bitcoin?? C’mon…
They’re all kind of old, though. Most of the active ones seem like 5-10 years old. Are there any recent new projects?
And are the projects from like 2009 still feasable? I mean both argorithms and compute hardware in the datacenters of those universities may have made leaps forwards since then?
I mean, during COVID, the folding@home network was the most powerful ‘datacentre’ in the world by quite a margin.
Home computing leaps almost as fast as the data centres do.
Einstein@Home does pulsar and (continuous) gravitational wave research. They have some long-running pulsar projects, which still find new pulsars getting published, and continuous gravitational wave research usually has a new project every 6-12 months.
The algorithms are improving all the time, and so do the volunteer computers.
That’s a good question.
From what I’ve gathered from my recent experience of running tasks, the project might have started years ago, but they are still offering tasks to be completed.
