Read BOINC in Retrospect, an essay on the history of BOINC.

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Is boinc ending?

Is boinc ending?

No. David Anderson is no longer very active in developing the project.
But there are other guys on the road.

Actually I'm still active. I'm working on BOINC Central, which is described in the essay.

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David,
You are too hard on yourself. The BOINC and SETI@Home projects went well for many years and while you were in charge. What wrecked both projects was climate change. Many influential people started asking, after many years of work, many thousands of dollars spent, and many billions of kilowatts of electricity consumed, where are the results?

Read Stark, R. (2005). The Victory of Reason, New York: Random House. Then, like NASA or the Defense Department, position your efforts as bringing progress to society, and as helping people free themselves from the tyrannies of poverty and ignorance. National cultures are like tectonic plates: When two such cultures meet one inevitably subsumes itself under the other. ET is all grown up now. Do you and the rest of the people on Earth want to be working for him? For free?

What ever happened to Rom Walton? What is the point of working for a university for many years, probably at relatively low wages, and not being encouraged or forced to take courses on the side so as to enable one to make contributions at a higher level in their or another organization?

"Everybody whoever made it had a mentor" is the title of a popular Harvard Business Review article and close to the truth. It took years to prepare people like Douglas MacArthur (Army Chief of Staff and eventually Supreme Commander in the Pacific and Military Governor of Japan) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (Supreme Commander in Europe, First NATO Commander, President of Columbia University, and President of the United States) for the highly specialized jobs they held. MacArthur was a product of a General Fox, a leader in the Spanish-American War, and MacArthur in turn developed Eisenhower into the person he became by forcing him to study what it took to win a European war.

It is sad to read that the original idea of BOINC did not work out as expected. What I don't get are the security concerns potential project owners may have concerning their data being run on private home pcs. Since there is a quorum on the results on a randomly chosen different pc it would be next to impossible to sneak in any fake positive result. Surely the most promising candidates for further research would be run again on their own hosts just to make sure. In terms of data security BOINC works very much like the TOR network If they would trust their data on one of the big cloud computing companies such as Microsoft or Amazon instead they must realize that those companies have the potential to read out all the data being run on their systems. It is a question if the data really gets encrypted as they claim. Those companies are also valuable targets for hackers.

If open to public research is difficult to continue maybe it is time to think about offering a payed service which would work similar to a cloud computing company. Of course it had to be a lot cheaper than the competition. Maybe a small incentive to the crunchers in Gridcoin or whatever. Doesn't have to much as most of us crunch only for stars (thank you Sebastien!) and badges anyway.

Maybe more drug makers could be convinced to use BOINC for their developments if they don't have to publish their results. In return they could agree to sell any new drug which was discovered through BOINC at a reduced price.

Anyway thank you David so far for so many years of dedication to the project!

Tom

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That is too much of an insider history; accurate no doubt, but not the main issue.

The two real problems are:

(1) BOINC is too complicated to use (for the developers mainly, not the users). That is mainly because of the scheduler, which tries to be all things to all people.
Just do what the Folding@home client does, and download a new work unit as the last one is finishing. You only need to add the ability to choose multiple projects, not just one.

(2) The other problem is that as the cost of computing has fallen, more research labs can do it in-house. That is especially true with the advent of AI. That is of course outside of the control of BOINC, except that BOINC could explore its use as a training resource for the in-house computing.

I agree that Dave is being too hard on himself. He has done an incredible job.

My minutes to hours old account is doesn't describe me well. I was at a community college in the 90's and got them to install Seti@home on their lab PC's. Since then the 'work' done and watching screen savers and such has benefited me tremendously, both in new subjects to talk about with friends, and in self satisfaction that I 'contributed.' I am very poor and was living out of my car through college but still have most of my PC's I've built and cherish them with regular dust cleaning, upgrading to Linux (When the next windows OS cost frustrates me), then my PC's retire to live out their days chugging away on finding health solutions, aliens, or astronomy things. (Seti/Boinc), I wrote down passwords on papers, long ago, or emailed back to myself (thus the young account), I once set up one computer to chug away on bitcoin mining, never again, for personal reasons I won't do that, ever again, but it answered what all that fuss was about. Back to this community though, I did have to draw that parallel over the years to tell people what my PC's were doing - compared to bitcoin mining... Anyways... I was just surfing newegg for ~$100 lenovo's I could just put a new ball bearing fan in then plop up in my upstairs in summer or downstairs in winter, and chug away on the next projects when I found Dave's retrospective (Never knew his name - same as mine!). Feeling a bit emotional here, melancholy . I've told others about Seti, later Boinc, sometimes more than I talk about my kid. Now I'm hesitant to snatch up a half dozen more computational PC's for the next installment... Change is the only inevitability. But still, I am human and feel. I must add my bit, to the whole pull and push right now between science, and (popularity, public relations, religiousness, etc), sometimes smacks right in my face while I'm trying to earn a paycheck. I've had three coworkers (a big office), in the last decade come to my desk to, I guess, convert me to their religion?... because I had flyers up asking for their old PC's (I'd give them their HDD on the spot), and how I'd set them up in my retirement home for PC's chugging away on things like SETI, and solving for cancer solutions, etc. I'd put in SSD's, ball-bearing fans, more RAM, then install Debian (back then), Ubuntu now.... These three different jokers, (they didn't talk to each other as far as I know), were trying to 'teach' me that the earth was 5,000 years old or some such, while I was (then) a seismic structural engineer... My mind would whirl up to speed, about conservation of momentum and energy in tectonic plates, then I'd see that these people just were doing as they were told, trying to push the limits of persuasion, eye contact, tone of voice, like their preachers... whatever... adding to their flock. Well, obviously I wasn't going to convert them back to science, anymore than they'd 'teach' me how old the earth was, and why Seti was rubbish (TO THEM - NOT ME). But this whole science vs. popular society is a real problem. I still work there (have for ~17 years), and will retire soon (but not soon enough), but everyone (who isn't a close friend, scientist, engineer), seems to just be bent on converting everyone to their thinking, or just plain trying to get free engineering out of me... something like that. I never talk about anything but work, at work, anymore. Geez! Anywho, sorry to make this about me. Back to Seti, and Boinc, I hope they continue, and keep doing the great work they do, but how they can, facing money, and popular pulls, seems tough. I'll probably still buy a half dozen (total of $600-700), (I've only got about 10 working now, a few off, need cleaning), others are doing other monitoring for me. I sometimes install Linux (Debian, or Ubuntu + open office), and give them to very needy families who just need to get online, I toss in a keyboard and mouse if I have them, and they're as poor as I once was. I'll point my home farm of PC's to that IBM, world community grid was it? They seem like the best long term bet, for plenty of work to do. Thanks for reading, Thanks to Dave, and all the developers, maintainers, and contributors, and I hope this tool keeps doing, contributing, inspiring, and is around for our kids, and their kids, to talk about, in some form (that music offshoot sounds cool), or many forms, or some form. Be well you all.

Great job

Bit of a late read. Thanks for keeping the project alive despite the difficulties!

Can't CERN help bring public attention to the whole project? People are going crazy over LHC lately and James Webb.

I understand the need to pay for people's time, so if getting an international Charity going would help - maybe it's worth considering?

There are a lot of us who are pro-BOINC across the globe who aren't big/rich/powerful. We just need to get the attention of those who have wealth to distribute if they knew it was going somewhere good.

Bit of a late read. Thanks for keeping the project alive despite the difficulties!
Can't CERN help bring public attention to the whole project? People are going crazy over LHC lately and James Webb.

The big, well-funded projects of course rely heavily on BOINC (LHC and Einstein@home, perhaps others, and in the future maybe Blackholes@home). These are important projects that have years of life to them. At this point, saying running "in perpetuity" seems reasonable!

In short, BOINC has made many important contributions, gotten people like me involved for a very long time in the discovery process, and will continue to do so in the future!