Achievements

[Tenjen]

boinc is the initiative to contribute idle computer processing resources for scientific and other related efforts, from anywhere on the planet.

i remember cause it reminds me of Bionic :3

OH AND I GOT MY INTERNETS WORKING MUH HUH FUH HURS!

*kicks you all in the CROTCH*

[Don Alexander]

*licks you all in the CROTCH*

...is probably more like it.

[Azrael]

It amused us that there are stats for boincing.

[yiraheerai]

VICTORY!!!! \o/

Dad's given me permission to adopt Big Fat Kitty. Mom's just been going "...sure," about it but uuhhh.

ANYWAY. I'm taking my dog with me to the shelter tomorrow and see how they get along. Probably going to scare the crap out of the poor cat but he's gotta know who he's coming home with. He's declawed which is both a bonus and a worry. Bonus because the only way out is for him to climb the fence and he can't do that with his weight + no claws. A worry because he has no defense against my dog if he needs it. :\ Plus vet bills. He's... a big kitty. I would not be surprised if he had troubles.

But this is part of why I want him. No one else is going to adopt him because of all those things. SO I WILL.

[Don Alexander]

*yira gets +100 awesomesauce points*

We await kitteh picks!!!

[Tenjen]

i saved a relationship!

i haz a proud :3

no details. Stuff spoken in confidance so other than mentioning saving, nothing to be said.

[Don Alexander]

[Don Alexander]

I'm a millionaire!!!

Well, at least in BOINC.

Today, basically simultaneously, I surpassed 1,000,000 both in Einstein@home and AQUA@home. I'm rapidly closing in on 7,000,000 in Collatz Conjecture, and in the next few days will hit 10,000,000 grand total!!!

[TellusEidolon]

What is BOINC, Don?

i've seen you've mentioned einstein@home etc.. in other posts but what exactly is it?

[Iceman]

I could say I'm especially good at surviving volcanic eruptions. So far I've been through Hekla'91, Grímsvötn at Gjálp'96, Grímsvötn'98, Hekla'00, Grímsvötn'04, Eyjafjöll'10 and Grímsvötn'11. Now, I'm waiting for Hekla and Katla to erupt, as their time has come.

[Radbaron]

BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure Networking Computers , a cloud based system. Units of work are sent out to individual computers, and the results sent back to the main ones. There are different projects involved, the main one being the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (S.E.T.I). Others include malaria research, prime number crunching, asteroid plot prediction paths...

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

[Don Alexander]

Cloud-based? I do not think that moniker actually applies here, since it's not home users employing the crunching power and drive space of large server farms, but scientific projects employing the crunching power and drive space of the home users. This is called a distributed computing project.

The original idea, as Rad has pointed out, was SETI@home, which started off as a screensaver application which analysed radio telescope data for anomolous signals which might be of extraterrestial origin. Such a program downloads workunits (WUs) from a server on the net, and "crunches" these using the computer's spare processing power.

I think a few other standalone projects (Prime Grid?) existed before a "shell" program was made, and this is BOINC. You download a single program (from the adress Rad gave), and then you can choose from several dozen scientific applications. There's still SETI, which remains the largest community within BOINC. Einstein searches for gravitational waves and pulsars (has found several of the latter, none of the former). AQUA is a quite new project which simulates quantum computer algorithms and is able to support multicore computers. Collatz Conjecture is a very popular (at least from the numbers of WUs crunched) application which tests the eponymous Collatz Conjecture (look for it on Wikipedia, it's an as-yet unproved mathematical theorem). CC supports, as one of only a few applications, ATI GPUs with single precision - other apps like Milkyway need Nvidia GPUs. Both on my laptop and my mom's new comp at home, we only have ATI GPUs, so I run CC because there's basically nothing else. But GPUs are incredibly fast processors, and therefore you rapidly accumulate huge credits.

We don't get payed for this, just the opposite, we actually increase our electricity bills and, in the long-term, damage the CPUs by having them run at 100% pretty much all the time. and all we get for it is credits. It's an idealistic thing, I guess. Though of course the more bio-oriented programs can become very important if they discover some breakthrough.

[Azrael]

Wow Alex, ten million BOINCs? And here you always say you're inexperienced.

[Iceman]

I cycled to work today and back home. Intogether some 27km, and it only took 1:50 hours put together.
Proud--->

[yiraheerai]

Adding someone who isn't my mom to the list of people in the car on a trip. Not going to sleep as a defense mechanism when the anxiety kicked in.

TODAY I AM AN ANXIETY-KICKING CHAMPION!! \o/!!!