Why I BOINC - World Community Grid
Hello again!
This post is connected to my first ever Steemit post which you can see here. In that post, I noted one of the reasons why I started to collect Gridcoin, but more importantly, why I choose to donate some of my idle CPU time to the World Community Grid (WCG) and other scientific projects.
The main project in the WCG that I support is Mapping Cancer Markers. It is anchored at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre / Hospital in Toronto, Canada and has been running since November 2013.
A little over 10 years ago, my uncle was treated at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre for pancreatic cancer. Not shortly after, my aunt was treated for bone cancer. While both battles were ultimately lost, it was through the dedication of the staff at Princess Margaret that allowed us the opportunity to spend a few more days and weeks with our loved ones. A vast amount of cancer research continues to be completed at the Princess Margaret and new forms of treatment continue to be developed. One day, I hope that cancer is considered to be a less formidable disease.
There are vast amounts of idle CPU & GPU time available across the world. This idle computational time holds the key to finding cures to various forms of cancer, diseases and other altruistic goals. While there is a cost of electricity to donate this idle computational time, it is a direct contribution to charitable causes that one can be reasonably assured is going directly towards that cause. Many charities in North America (and I am guessing in other areas) have been fighting a battle of reputation of how cash donations are ultimately used.
While I understand that the electricity costs present a barrier to donating spare computation time, that’s where Gridcoin comes into play. The “mining” of Gridcoin is simply a byproduct of crunching work units via BOINC. There are many projects that use BOINC to utilize spare computational power, with WCG above being one of them. Gridcoin can be used to help offset these costs and place you in a net neutral position.
I encourage all of you to consider donating some idle computational time, be it your PC, phone, tablet or even a Raspberry Pi. Every FLOP of computation counts!
You can learn more amount BOINC and Gridcoin by using the embedded links.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post.
Cheers!
Marvelously succinct.
My wife (@madlila) started distributed computing with SETI@home MANY years back long before it was AT ALL easy to do, because that was in the day it was too easy to leave the monitor on and burn the phosphor...and sleep/standby literally didn't exist. Electricity costs were nearly inconsequential for nearly 7 months out of the year, since electric heat was a major expense, and still is.
I jumped into it several times myself, heavily around 2008 and maybe 2012- with replacing hardware and OSes, I would drop out unintentionally- but I think this time, with a decent rig, even if it's nearly a decade old, with the overhead (1 out of 4 cores and regulated by demand by the manager) so negligible, I'm going to stick with it.
The opportunity Gridcoin offers extends far beyond simply writing off the ergs used.
Thanks for sharing your story about Gridcoin and WCG.
Joining WCG is always something I come back to every time I start up a new BOINC session 👍 It just gives so much back in medication reach and we can all relate I'm different ways to the different areas of research they do!
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I love the WCG and what they are doing; learned of them very early on in their start up and wish I had stayed with them, but I was new in the computer/internet world, and the program download then was a bit more than I could risk on my cheap machine. But, later when i started building them, I realized from a friend that i needed to join and since my new machine ran 24/7/365, plus internet; I said yeah a great chance to do some good, and as she said get some repayment too; but at that point it was just a pipe dream, and now Compumatrix, and Gridcoin have made that a reality, so glad, I need to build other powerful machines. I take on any and all of their projects.