I achieved 100 million points in Einstein@Home, and rediscovered Folding@Home

I achieved one hundred million points in Einstein@Home. Another BOINC achievement, this time for a specific project. Einstein@Home has always been one of my favourite BOINC projects, with an interesting topic, and as important, a great, very communicative team of admins, and a welcoming community.

My Einstein@Home certificate, with a very “early 00s” design

Of course those points don’t mean much other than showing that I gave time and money to crunch work units, but a round number is a round number :) That, and bragging rights in an extremely niche topic.

My Einstein Machines

For the last few months I’ve been crunching E@H mostly on my Raspberry Pi cluster . A Raspberry Pi 4b is very weak in comparison to desktop PCs, but uses little power and can run in the background 24/7 being barely noticeable, especially with a custom cooling solution. A single Pi crunches around 1400 points per day based on my observations. Having ARM tasks is not common in BOINC projects, and that is another upside for Einstein.

My current E@H machines, there have been many more before them

Crunching Einstein on Pis would never bring me close to that milestone, most of the heavy lifting has been done by my homelab server, crunching tasks on a Nvidia RTX 3060 12GB. The GPU is a bit bottlenecked by my slow CPU, especially in mix CPU/GPU tasks such as the All Sky Gravitional Search, but for now it will have to be this way, upgrading my homelab needs to wait as I have more important spendings. I don’t usually run my GPU crunching 24/7, but if I were, with crunching All Sky, the theoretical rate would be around 600k points per day.

My BOINC life

In general, my focus on BOINC has fallen down in the recent months, mostly because it was announced that Universe@Home, the project I crunched the most, will not be restarted. After the death of the lead scientist there has been a search for a team that could continue the research, but nobody was found. The project servers are still up, and a single maintainer keeps the lights on in hope of a change, but the chances are dim. That brought me down a lot.

Also, as part of saying goodbye to Google, I changed the email address on all my BOINC project accounts, and that messed up the BOINC statistics page, Universe is no longer showing in my stats, and that was 1/3 of my total points. I know that we crunch for science and not for fairy pointless internet points, but hey, it feels good when number go up.

So, what now?

I will continue crunching Einstein@Home on my Pi cluster as long as it’s running, probably a few months until I disassemble it and use the Pis for different usecases. My long term plan and hope is to go back to BOINC full time once I start producing cheap, clean electricity from my PV installation, but that will probably happen sometime late next year, not sure yet.

Going back to Folding@Home

As I put BOINC on the back burner, Emil@Collectifission reminded me of the existence of Folding@Home. F@H shares a similar idea as BOINC, distributed computing to solve scientific problems, but runs on a different software, and it it’s own closed ecosystem, with a single app and projects being handed out by some sort of algorithm. I crunched F@H for a few months during its sudden peak in popularity, when the project was looking for ways to fight COVID in the initial phase of the global pandemic (you remember that time?).

I decided that a change of scenery would be good, and I joined F@H again with a new account and started some crunching. Not sure how long I will crunch for them, we’ll see. I also joined his team for Fediverse users, please feel invited!

And that’s it. When will I reach 200 million in Einstein? As Albert himself said in the intro to Red Alert , “Sooner or later, time will tell”.

If you would to join BOINC and have problems with setting up your account or system, let me know, I will be happy to help.

My previous “BOINC achievements” blog posts:

My thoughts as I reach 100 million points in BOINC

I reached 150 million points in BOINC

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