I reached 150 million points in BOINC
I started BOINCing somewhere in April of 2021. It took me two years and four months to reach 100 million points. In August of 2023 I wrote a blog post about this milestone . Today, less than a year later, I reached 150 million points, and it’s time to write an update.
Of course those are only imaginary Internet swag points, but on the other hand they do show the real life resources, electricity and hardware, that I put into BOINC.
Since the last update I have been mostly crunching Einstein@Home and Asteroids@Home, with some Universe@Home and Milkyway@Home. I reached 87 million points in Einstein, mostly thanks to the new GPU based O3AS application that is very “generous” when it comes to points. In Milkyway@Home I reached 10 million points, mostly to get to a nice round number. In Asteroids I passed 4 million points, and in Universe I’m at 50 million, and it looks like that I will stay at this level for a long time.
I’ve been mostly crunching on my desktop, with a Ryzen 3700X and an RTX2060 GPU. I also used my new Raspberry Pi 5 to do some crunching, and I wrote a series of blog posts, comparing it with the Pi 4b:
In the recent months I mostly moved my crunching to a Hetzner Server Auction box. I find them to have the best price to performance ratio when it comes to rentable servers, and crunching tasks on a 32 thread Ryzen 5950X was a joy to observe. I did it so as not share the electricity costs with my wife, and also reduce the noise and heat in our home.
So, that’s about me, but how does the general BOINC situation look today? Bleak.
The BOINC ecosystem does look like it is sunsetting, with no new projects on the horizon, and existing ones having issues and scaling down, with one notable exception.
Gaia@Home seems to be permanently down and I don’t have any hope for it anymore.
Universe@Home has sadly lost their main scientist, and they have been inactive since January. There were talks about reactivating it in April or May, but now it’s late June, and nothing happened.
Milkyway@Home has finished their GPU application, and now provides only one CPU app.
World Community Grid just cannot get their stuff together after all those years after being acquired. Most of their apps have tasks very rarely or not at all. At least their website doesn’t break twice a day as it used to.
Asteroids@Home seems ok, they have had a steady run for the last months, with a good stream of jobs to crunch, and even development work to make them more efficient and use modern CPU features.
And Einstein@Home, the jewel in the BOINC crown, a project that has a steady flow of new jobs to crunch, new projects being developed, and the best, most responsive staff I’ve ever seen in a BOINC project.
As I said again and again, I think BOINC is a great project that could bring a lot of added value to the world, but it’s underfunded and understaffed. The current situation is just so sad, watching the BOINC ecosystem curl and shrink. Seeing a new BOINC project appearing would be the coolest thing.
That’s all for today, see you at 200 million points for a new update.
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