Introduction
BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is an open network computing platform used for volunteer computing and grid computing. BOINC was initially developed to support SETI@home and has gradually become the mainstream distributed computing platform used for various disciplines such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, life sciences, and earth sciences. The development of BOINC aims to help researchers conveniently access the computing resources of volunteers distributed worldwide. Many research institutions lack funding, but many scientific research projects require significant computational power. Therefore, distributed computing methods are used to process large amounts of data, and the computational power contributed by users is used to calculate projects in mathematics, physics, chemistry, life sciences, and earth sciences.
Tutorial
First, open https://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php to download and install.
It is recommended to download the version with VirtualBox, as some projects require it to run.
After installation, the startup interface will look like this.
It is recommended to adjust to the advanced interface for easier modification of settings.
To run BOINC, you need to join a project first.
Clicking on it will show various projects, and there will be introductions on the right. If it is in English, you can copy it for translation.
Although you can create an account by clicking Next, I recommend clicking on the website link to register on the webpage, where you can modify information.
Most registration pages look like the following image. Some websites use recaptcha, which requires software like steam++ to assist in accessing.
After completing the registration, go back to BOINC, add a project, and select "I have already registered."
Finally, click Finish.
You can join my team at https://arkarchive.org/boinc.html
Recommendations
Using the CPU has lower efficiency, so it is recommended to only run the GPU. You can adjust the computational parameters on the website and change them to the following:
After testing, it was found that running PrimeGrid on an AMD graphics card does not affect transcoding speed and does not significantly increase power consumption. However, calling CUDA on nVidia cards will affect transcoding speed.
However, only the majority of astronomical, physical, and mathematical projects support GPU acceleration. Except for the gpugrid project, other biological projects do not support GPU acceleration.
Others
Some projects can be used to earn (or lose) money with BOINC, even not enough to cover electricity costs. If you want to make money, it is not recommended to try. However, if you want to share computing power, you can refer to the next tutorial.