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Why I Quit Running BOINC

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek0
BOINC logo

This weekend I switched all of my BOINC machines to Folding@Home. Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time knows that I’ve been a big supporter of BOINC but I just couldn’t deal with it anymore.

Admit it. Most of us got into BOINC because SETI was searching for ET and we’re geeks. Then there were some cool projects that tried to cure AIDS, COVID, and the like. IBM waded into the fray creating World Community Grid, a solid, professionally run project that was there to do the BOINC technical work for other research projects.

Go into any of the BOINC message forums now. Everyone is bitching about no work units and dead projects. Whoever took over World Community Grid after IBM abandoned it made a circle jerk out of it. Seemed like it was down more than it was up. RNA World is gone. Dennis@Home seems to have died a while ago.

For a brief few months SiDock seemed to be a ray of hope. It’s been down for weeks now. “Official” story is a drive failed on a mirror array. Jesus people! Who set your storage up? I had two drives fail in my NAS and I was up and running in under a week. That time included waiting for Seagate to ship me drives! What? Are your hard drives stuck in the Strait of Hormuz? Buy from someone else!

The only project that would regularly bury anyone’s box with work was Einstein@Home. I’m just not that into space anymore. I’m more into helping out the search for cures to cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other shit that just might kill me some day. Lost a couple of relatives to Alzheimer’s already.

Folding@Home

This weekend I was exchanging emails with a friend and he told me about Folding@Home. I briefly remembered Folding@Home as part of BOINC years ago. Never worked quite right then it disappeared. Just look at the diseases they are fighting!

If you are over 30 you should be concerned about these. Is it too much to ask to leave your computer on and let it crunch? You may be a Trump Turd claiming COVID-19 is a hoax, but it’s not. I had a Trump Turd classmate who proclaimed that all the way to his grave. Yes, he died of COVID-19. If you try to claim Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s are a hoax then people ought to kick the shit out of you in a dark alley every day of your life. I buried relatives from Alzheimer’s. A classmate recently buried his dad from Parkinson’s. They are humiliating, debilitating diseases that take every shred of human dignity from you.

BOINC Got Upity

GPUGrid and a few other projects would spit up messages about you needing to upgrade to the latest Nvidia drivers to participate. Basically they wanted you to go out and buy a thousand dollar video card and let them use it. You’ve seen my posts about this. Many of us in the volunteer computer world set aside old machines with old cheap video cards to help cure diseases.

Folding@Home Not Upity

I stuck a GT 630 based Zotac card in that AMD 6-core Athalon box running Manjaro 26. Switched to the 470 driver and it is Folding along.

They don’t care what you got, they’ll use it. They claim to still support 32-bit platforms. Can you get more done with a balls to the wall system? Most likely. Point is they know beggars can’t be choosers.

Technical Notes

Folding@Home requires systemd on Linux. That’s why my last machine isn’t converted yet. Installing LMDE 7 and that seems to be taking a very long time to apply updates.

There is no local config gui. You have to use a browser and this address.

Unlike BOINC, it doesn’t consume your machine. You’ve all had that. BOINC not being able to tell when you are typing at the keyboard or wiggling the mouse. Just keeps using 100% of the machine. Even on that AMD 6-core, I don’t know it is there.

Teams

Seems that every volunteer computing project wants you to “join a team.” There are a zillion of them. I opted to create my own rather than trying to fit in with some egomaniac.

Twenty of Two team number: 1068243

If you read this and decide to Fold, please join my team. There’s no secret handshake and as long as you are never up wind of or in an enclosed space with me, I don’t even care if you bathe.

Let’s cure something together!

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.

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