What is Gridcoin?

If you've never heard of Gridcoin, it's a cryptocurrency that securely rewards BOINC computation on top of Proof of Stake. BOINC statistics are gathered directly from the project servers & all nodes agree on a daily superblock containing verified team statistics.

The Gridcoin network maintains a list of whitelisted BOINC projects (project whitelist status is voted upon by the network) in order to only reward users crunching secure projects that the community approves of. Without a whitelist, users may attempt to fraudulently generate Gridcoin by crunching fake projects.

More info on Gridcoin.

How can I get my BOINC project added to Gridcoin's whitelist?

The Gridcoin community regularly votes on whether or not to whitelist new BOINC projects. Voting weight is a balance of magnitude+balance, so both investors and BOINC crunchers (within team gridcoin) are able to vote on the outcome of your project's whitelist application.

Application/Checklist

In order to begin the whitelist application, you must fill out the following application and post it to the whitelist thread

• Provide a brief description of the BOINC project.
• What is the category of the project? (Volunteer/non-profit | Commercial/For-Profit | BOINC DAC).
• If the BOINC project is commercial/for-profit:
  • Does the project intend to reward BOINC users for their contributed work?
  • Is the project backed by a company?
• Is the project suitable for Proof-Of-Research? (Is completed work verifiable? Non-fake-able results)
• Does the project have an entry on netsoft/boincstats/free-dc/other BOINC statistics site?
• Does the project website provide SSL encryption?
• Will the project have sufficient work units for team Gridcoin to all participate in the project? More than a month of inactivity will lead to invalidation of whitelist status.
• Have the project admins/owners acknowledged the existence of Gridcoin? Is the proposal to whitelist the project originating from the project administrator or a community member?
• Is the project's purpose legal?
• Upon virus scanning the work units being distributed by the project, are there any detections? (https://www.virustotal.com/ being the most reliable).

Why would I want my BOINC project added to Gridcoin's whitelist?

The Gridcoin network rewards the users within team 'Gridcoin' on behalf of BOINC project admins, thus users are encouraged to crunch your BOINC project at their maximum capability.

Without presence on Gridcoin's whitelist, your project may not experience sufficient computing resources being dedicated to your project to justify running the BOINC project.

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What is BOINC?

BOINC is an open-source volunteer oriented computing grid that combines the processing power of all individual users for the purposes of scientific research. It's free, and harnesses the unused clock cycles from processors and graphics cards to attempt to cure cancer/aids/ebola/malaria, map the milkyway, crack enigma codes, etc..

What are some examples of existing BOINC projects?

World Community Grid : Attempting to solve Cancer, Ebola, Malaria, Zika, etc
SETI@Home : Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI)
GPUGRID : Full-atom molecular simulations of proteins
Asteroids@home : Asteroid research - it uses photometric measurements of asteroids observed by professional big all-sky surveys as well as 'backyard' astronomers. The data is processed using the lightcurve inversion method and a 3D shape model of an asteroid together with the rotation period and the direction of the spin axis are derived.
Milkyway@home : Creation of a 3d map of the milkyway galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.
vLHCathome : Full-fledged LHC event physics simulations
Rosetta@Home : Protein structure prediction that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases. Disease Related Research
Cosmology@Home : Darkmatter/Universe Model Research

Examples of more whitelisted projects

Who can make a BOINC project?

Anyone can create a BOINC project, there's no centralised authority that you are required to consult before creating a BOINC project. If you've got a good idea, go ahead and create it.

How can I make a BOINC project?

You could simplify project setup by using the BOINC Server Docker container.

Read this official (old) 'creating boinc projects' PDF guide to get an understanding of how to implement a boinc project. [VIRUSTOTAL SCAN: 0/53]
Look into the Project creation cookbook to simplify the implementation of a BOINC project.
'Building BOINC and BOINC applications on linux' - October 2009

What are the benefits of a BOINC project over cloud computing?

Whitepapers on this topic

The cost of virtualization implementation in volunteer computing
Increasing GP Computing Power for Free via Desktop GRID Computing and Virtualization

Cost-Benefit Analysis

[PDF] Cost-Benefit Analysis
of Cloud Computing versus Desktop Grids
[VIRUSTOTAL SCAN RESULTS: 0 / 53]

An extract from the above PDF:

We determined the cost-benefits of cloud computing versus volunteer computing applications. We calculated VC overheads for platform construction, application deployment, compute rates, and completion times. We found that in the best-case scenario, hosts register at a rate of 124 cloud nodes per day. We found that the ratio of volunteer nodes needed to achieve the compute power of a small EC2 instance is about 2.83 active volunteer hosts to 1.

We detailed the specific costs of a large and small VC project. We find that monthly VC project costs range between 5K-12K, and startup costs range from 4K to 43K. If cloud computing systems are to replace VC platforms, payper-use costs would have to decrease by at least an order of magnitude.

With these performance and monetary cost-benefits in mind, we compared the two platforms. We find that at least ∼1404 volunteer nodes are needed before VC becomes more cost effective in terms of cents per FLOP. Nevertheless, the cost of a 1000-node cloud will exceed that of VC system after three days. We also find that 4 months on EC2 with 1000 nodes can support over a year of SETI@home. We also examined the size of a cloud platform sustainable by VC costs. With 12K per month, SETI could purchase a maximum of 2 TeraFLOPS sustained over a month with High CPU instances.

What are the different possible categories of BOINC project?

Volunteer/non-profit

Scientists: Use BOINC to create a volunteer computing project.
Universities: Use BOINC to create a Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center.

Commercial/For-Profit

Companies: use BOINC for desktop Grid computing.
Create a commercial BOINC project (such as a video rendering project), charge customer and distribute pay to BOINC crunchers (with a small fee for the BOINC project to continue maintenance).

BOINC DAC

Create a decentralized autonomous BOINC corporation.
Create a decentralized company that anyone can profit from, and anyone can submit relevant work units towards for GRC.

Examples: Decentralized storage, virtual worlds/marketplaces, anonymous TOR BOINC projects (whilst maintaining legal status to be whitelisted).

You would need to investigate reducing the centralisation of the BOINC server to be categorised as a decentralized:

Optimizing the data distribution layer of BOINC with BitTorrent

Attic: A Case Study for Distributing Data in BOINC Projects
Extending the BOINC architecture using peer-to-peer application code exchange
Golem Project

Brainstorming new BOINC projects

We have an existing thread on cryptocointalk where we have discussed ideas for new projects.

If you are interested in taking on any of the below ideas, go ahead!

Tensorflow (Commercial project idea)

TensorFlow™ is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. Nodes in the graph represent mathematical operations, while the graph edges represent the multidimensional data arrays (tensors) communicated between them. The flexible architecture allows you to deploy computation to one or more CPUs or GPUs in a desktop, server, or mobile device with a single API. TensorFlow was originally developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain Team within Google's Machine Intelligence research organization for the purposes of conducting machine learning and deep neural networks research, but the system is general enough to be applicable in a wide variety of other domains as well.

TensorFlow has recently released distributed computing support, an enterprising prospective BOINC project administrator could create a TensorFlow BOINC project in which a customer submits machine learning code to be distributed onto thousands of CPUs/GPUs/phones for a fee of which 95% would be distributed to the project's crunchers and 5% taken for the project maintenance costs.

Since TensorFlow is a Google/Alphabet product, it might bring some serious attention to BOINC/Gridcoin.

Super-node/Full-node project (Commercial project idea)

It's important to run full node clients for your cryptocurrency, but for most cryptocurrencies there is no reward mechanism for running a full node.

An interesting idea for a BOINC project would be to distribute a docker unit containing a (verified secure) cryptocurrency full node client. This wouldn't just be for a single cryptocurrency but for multiple cryptocurrencies (bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum, etc..) - customers could pay to have more computing resources dedicated to running full nodes for a set period of time & the majority of fees could be distributed to those running the full nodes.

The main difficulty would be ensuring that the full node client ports were not blocked - there would need to be a benchmark/verification stage checking full connectivity (verifying full node capability). Secondary difficulty would be deciding how to reward users - bandwidth/connections/uptime etc.

Mobile sensor networks

Distributed mobile sensor network would be run on android phones, and ran using the htc power to give open source android app.
If it was a very low power usage, then we could have it regularly grab data for collecting a lot of anonymous data that everyone would have access to.

The kind of data we might find good:

• Distributed weather sensor network; everyone's phone regularly returns the temperature, humidity, radiation - any interesting environmental data.
• Signal strength for networks; map the signal strength for all mobile carriers to figure out what mobile network would be best for you.
• You could make a commercial boinc project, taking payment and rewarding users for their participation in gridcoin for a SCiO sensor network (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/903107259/scio-your-sixth-sense-a-pocket-molecular-sensor-fo?ref=discovery).
  • Lets say you wanted everyone to scan something for research - oranges for example. You pay the project to distribute a work unit where everyone around the world goes and scans their nearest orange.. The customer gets in return for payment tens of thousands of scans of whatever they want. Project takes a small fee for hosting service, rest of payment goes to users.
  • With the above, you could distribute work units to find contaminated food products in geographical areas, or work out the pollution affecting food in areas.

Opensim/Hypergrid servers

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Hypergrid

Imagine we distributed Opensim docker containers and linked them together via Hypergrid. Users would need to prioritise up-time and perhaps there would need to be a minimum computer spec for this to be feasible.

Customers could rent land within the opensim servers & these fees could be distributed to those running the opensim servers.

Additionally, there is currently no in-game cryptocurrency, only centralised payment options. You could integrate cryptocurrency to increase usage of Gridcoin within the servers for in-game items or property.

http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Economy
http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Money
http://forge.opensimulator.org/gf/project/currency/

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Do you have an idea for a potential BOINC project, or do you have questions about either BOINC or Gridcoin? Reply below :)

Best regards,
CM.