Is Boinc losing its ability to draw projects?

This is both a post to raise awareness, and a question that I am not sure I know the answer.  Long story short, I realized how lopsided mine, and the Atlantic teams credits were recently, and I wondered if there was anything I could do to throw a little spice into the mix by adding another project.

That is where the issue came in, besides WCG and GPUgrid, there seem to be few to no projects that offer somewhat wide base appeal and focus on humanitarian issues with mass appeal.  As much as I am a fan of all sciences, you must admit, in terms of questions we need answers to now to vastly improve the lives of everyone on the planet, are mostly medically or biologically based.  Which seems to have few projects out there (few scientists with the know how/ time/ funding to do so?).  Moreover even WCG seems to be starving for projects and if anyone could attract top talent I'd imagine it would be them.  World Community Grid is down to 6 projects, 3 current and 3 intermittent.

Moreover the power of GPU computing has been recognized, almost to the point that it is almost making supporting GPU computing on any single project a self defeating task, in the sense that the people willing to complete the tasks will finish them in a fraction of the time it seems to talk your team to find a new item to study, then code the project for the GPU tasks. In fact it appears the only projects that can sustain GPU tasks either have a dedicated team of researchers/ programmers designed to churn out item after item after item as part of their funded research, or are actually tied to something that has such a massive amount of test cases that they can be considered near inexhaustible. (Scanning space for a given items.)


So is this lack of projects that *matter* and to a larger extent projects in general that there are currently as opposed to just a few years ago, a sign that the ability for BOINC or BOINC like systems are not effective?  Or could it in fact be that they are actually too effective?  I do know, and have realized that in large quite a few people lose faith in BOINC after awhile, I mean for one look at BOINCstats and just look at how many thousands of thousands of people you can flip through from the bottom of the ranks in which a majority of people listed have zero credits listed for the past month and an average credit that is very low or zero.

I for one certainly hope more projects are in the works-- in general, or at the very least for World Community Grid.

Balancing credits...

... sometimes it is basically impossible.
Especially if you have a GPU set to crunch GPUgrid tasks.

Basically nearly every single GPUgrid result returned is worth insanely more credits than the amount that 3 cores of my CPU and minimal credits from my Nexus 7 contribute.   Take is as you like, but you must definitely get used to seeing credit distribution pie charts like:

But in the effort of saving a bit of cash, after having my main rig offline for a month, and viewing that power bill, vs, my most recent bill in which it ran for an entire month, it is about a $15-$20 difference in the cost of my utility bill.  So needing to update it badly, I am pulling things offline for about a week, hopefully allowing the weather to cool off again before turning it on.

The Good and the Bad for August

I will admit, I have stopped following my stats on boinc very closely, and I am incredibly sure I have fallen a great deal recently.  Especially as I am not sure how many/ if any days in August my main machine has run.  Honestly 2 of my machines were taken off line from crunching, to be replaced by an android tablet when ever it happens to be plugged in ( which is less than I would like).  The tablet of course pales in crunching ability compared to even my oldest computer that I have since taken off line.

So the bad for August will be dismal numbers, and dismal contribution to science through the abilities of my computers.  The good?  Well if you can consider this good, I managed to save over $30 dollars  this past month due not crunching, and other efforts I have undertaken to conserve energy in my household.  While I know that is not all my computer, as August was quite a cool month, and for quite a few weeks my AC barely ever ran.

When things cool off for the winter I will feel far better about having my machine run 24/7 again.  So to my team members, I apologize and it will hopefully only be a bit longer till the credits start raining again.