I am trying to draft up a comprehensive (if possible) list of the common criticisms that can arise from the use of BOINC for volunteer DC.

I did some searching on the forum here but did not turn up an obvious thread, nor did I find anything germaine in the Q&A section. Apologies in advance if I missed it.

What would be ideal are criticisms followed by reasonable rebuttals. Below are some example criticisms followed by an ATTEMPT at rebuttal.

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criticism

BOINC DC projects tend to encourage users to leave their computers on 24/7, bad for the environment.

rebuttal

Cost can be offset with low energy devices or green energy supplier. 24/7 computer usage not obligatory.

criticism

Who gets to use the data from Rosetta or other protein folding projects, Big Pharma?

rebuttal

The Rosetta project is being conducted by a research laboratory at the University of Washington

From Wikipedia

One of Rosetta@home's goals is to "computationally" ... determine the 3D structure and function of as many proteins as possible, and to make this information available to researchers worldwide at no cost.

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I hope that someone can direct me to a good source of criticism/rebuttals or perhaps chime in with critcisms you have observed.

I suppose I'm looking for the top ten reasons that people are hesitant to use BOINC, and I realize that I'll be getting a Rosetta perspective from some of you, but I'm also aware that many of you are engaged in other BOINC DC projects such as Einstein, CPDN, etc.

What I am drafting is likely to reach a fair sized audience on the Internet, and I expect that it will generate a surge in interest in BOINC DC projects, with Rosetta figuring prominently among them. Thanks in advance to all who respond.

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Checked the SETI@home forums out. That is where most cruchers are. There are a vast store of threads there.

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Here is a lengthy Rosetta thread on the subject.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

I do not crunch for Rosetta, right now, but have in the past. I do currently crunch for Malaria and have come to realize that alot of people leave their computers on 24/7 even if they are not crunching. In fact as a guy that builds and repairs computers, in my spare time, people tend to ask me what they should do with htier computers, especially now that alot of people are going to broadband for their internet. I tell them to leave them on 24/7, it is less wear and tear on the hardware and newer pc's are designed to work thru their usable life span of 4 to 5 years without any problems while being left running 24/7. Laptops being the major exception although I have a laptop that has been on since the day I bought it except for some short vacations where it was off during the actual travel time and then left on 24/7 while at my destination. Newer pc's just do not have the horsepower to keep up with the innovations that are coming down the line and all pc's will be replaced in faster and faster time frames. Yes even the quad core pc's will need to be replaced within 4 to 5 years. The Program makers are just taking advantage of too many new things and technologies faster and faster and those old pc's just cannot keep up. All this is leading to the fact that newer pc's should be left on 24/7 and the small hit taken by crunching during idle times is not a bad thing. With the newer pc's using less and less energy etc, it is starting to make no sense to turn them off anyway. If one uses the power button on the monitor to turn it off when they walk away, even less energy is consumed while the pc is happily crunching. And who knows maybe YOU will be the one that finds the cure for Malaria, ET or in Rosetta "reducing the possibilities by computer to the most likely candidates for further laboratory trials puts the world much closer to successful cures for the world�s most deadly diseases. Your computer and hundreds of other are used for trial of selected biochemical components combinations until one with the lowest net charge is found."

If YOUR pc was turned on and THE cure or THE unit or THE whatever was found, the World would fairly quickly become a better place. And isn't THAT what we are all striving for, to make our own small contribution to making the World a better place than it currently is?!

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I have someone on my team who is leaving because there is no discussion on the algorithms and efficiency.

To quote:

"The rosetta project doesn't talk about their algorithms or how they're working to make the process more efficient. My computer uses a *LOT* more power when it's running that project. I want to know that they're using it wisely, but they don't talk about that.

[I'm guessing] they could do a couple cabinets of diskless, thin-OS blades and cover 90% of the work that's being done by inefficient home computers using probably 20% of the electricity. You'd be surprised at how much difference there is between 100% CPU and 0% CPU when you look at an ammeter and with so much fossil fuel power generation, i don't know how responsible that is.

My computer has a consumer-grade power supply, a powerful video card, a hard drive, a CD drive, and all sorts of unnecessary hardware running. It's running windows which takes some overhead. A dedicated compute machine could probably get way more math per watt, if you see what I mean."

I did talk to this person about limiting hours they ran it, and limiting CPU use, but they're really concerned about overall efficiency of the project. I'm not really sure how to respond to that.

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I think current contributors can tend to get anxious especially if they haven't heard that a scientific breakthrough has occurred yet. Most of the communication from the project is old, and we simply must trust that progress is continuing to be made. I don't see why suddenly work would stop on the project? It's basically the life's work of at least several scientists at the University of Washington.

As far as power usage, that argument just doesn't fly with me AT ALL. For all the things that you can use power for, I would think "searching for a cure to diseases," or "taking a quantum leap forward in protein research." is a pretty good use of money/carbon. I dunno, I could be using my computer to play games, surf the net, or I could turn it off.

The only thing your team member lists that DOES hurt to idle is the graphics card, everything else doesn't spend much power while idling...

If suddenly millions of computers crunched for science instead of idling, I don't think it would make a dent in pollution. AND if that was a case, we'd be much closer to a cure and we wouldn't NEED to crunch for science for an infinite amount of time. We COULD stop or pull back.

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Kosh, it sounds like your friends true concern is watts per credit, or perhaps that their machine is being used so intensely. Yet they state their objection as being that the Project Team hasn't adequately explained they are improving their algorythms. Yet, did they notice Rosetta mini? A compelte revamp of the code, which will use less memory, and allow new science to be more easily plugged in, and more complex work to be run in the same memory as the less complex work from the recent past.

It would be interesting to ask them, if they had a choice between doing two types of Rosetta work, one which was well-known and understood, and not intensive to run, but testing that needs to be done to reconfirm algorythm revisions... and the other type being new science that is very computationally intensive... which would they prefer to run?

The whole point here is that learning about proteins computationally, with continuous improvement in your process, will ultimately make it trivial to determine a protein's structure... and thus require comparatively little CPU time. ...until then, we all need to help.

For me the cost of electricity is roughly equal per BTU to the cost of propane to heat my home, and it's Winter here, so I might as well use the electricity for something positive prior to getting the heat from it.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

The power issue is really no big deal in the winter. You will use some type of energy to heat your living space and it could be the by-product of R@H.

You could make a better argument on this in the summer and some people do set the PC to only work at night or when outside temps are lower in the summer.

I have a geothermal HVAC so I just run these systems 24x7x365.

We will find a cure...

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Thx!

Paul

I have someone on my team who is leaving because there is no discussion on the algorithms and efficiency.

To quote:

"The rosetta project doesn't talk about their algorithms or how they're working to make the process more efficient. My computer uses a *LOT* more power when it's running that project. I want to know that they're using it wisely, but they don't talk about that.

[I'm guessing] they could do a couple cabinets of diskless, thin-OS blades and cover 90% of the work that's being done by inefficient home computers using probably 20% of the electricity. You'd be surprised at how much difference there is between 100% CPU and 0% CPU when you look at an ammeter and with so much fossil fuel power generation, i don't know how responsible that is.

My computer has a consumer-grade power supply, a powerful video card, a hard drive, a CD drive, and all sorts of unnecessary hardware running. It's running windows which takes some overhead. A dedicated compute machine could probably get way more math per watt, if you see what I mean."

I did talk to this person about limiting hours they ran it, and limiting CPU use, but they're really concerned about overall efficiency of the project. I'm not really sure how to respond to that.

Your friends problem is that yes those blade pc's will run much more efficiently, is he willing to up front the cost for them? If not then tell him that is why DC came about, because it is cheaper for any given Project to spread the work out to others that essentially costs them little and costs us little also. But in the long run the costs do not hit the Project, they hit us crunchers. Yes the Project has to fund servers and people to run them to create, distribute and then capture and evaluate the units, but that can be done theu grants etc. Blade servers etc, are EXPENSIVE, especially when they need upgrading every few years to keep up. Farming the units out to us puts all those upgrade costs on you and I, making the Project cheaper to run.

As for the algorithms, those are probably treated like trade secrets.

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