"For the betterment of BOINC" - Post suggestions on how to improve BOINC!
"For the betterment of BOINC"
User 'Ageless' (Long time BOINC user/volunteer/moderator/project-admin) has asked the community for input regarding the improvement of BOINC!
"Last week Richard Haselgrove and I were asked to join a BOINC Work Group committee which researches how BOINC can be made more user friendly, easier for anyone to set up their own short- or long term project, and for the community to join in on those endeavours. The goal is to get more people to run BOINC, to join in coding all parts that make BOINC (client, manager, web site, forums, projects, etc.), to test everything, to get them to set up their own projects, to make BOINC a future-proof and reliable brand that isn't dependent on any one person in particular."
Contribute your ideas!
Is there anything you would like to change with regards to the BOINC client & server?
Is there anything you think would put BOINC on the map? For example to add social media inside BOINC Manager, or have certain add-ons integrated into the client?
IMO, adding links to the #boinc sub-steemit page so as to drive some of the 500k active & 4m registered BOINC users to Steemit would be a great idea, as would providing a link to the BOINC telegram group so as to create a team-neutral communication platform.
What are your thoughts? Any ideas?
Best regards,
@cm-steem
It would be nice that there would be more control over how each of the project tasks are prioritized. Right now if you suspend processing and then resume it, it would sometimes start a new task instead of working on the one already in progress. Adding something like "order" and ability drag individual tasks in the tasks list (advanced view), to change that order, would be a nice addition.
It would also be nice that in projects view you could also see number of available tasks for each project so not to wonder if it's something on your end.
Having more control over GPU utilization so that it wouldn't go to 100%, when working on certain tasks, would also be a plus.
Yeah, currently when doing GPU work it's a matter of 'Is or isn't crunching on GPU with full capacity' rather than 'use 10% of my GPU for this work unit'. I believe that this would require the project itself to limit the GPU utilization somehow through an introduce field on the boinc project website, as it'd be difficult for the BOINC client to reduce the resource utilization of a GPU work unit.
A summary of available work would be great, currently the best place to view this information is on gridcoinstats.eu
There is the alternative BOINC client 'Boinctasks' which may be able to provide you better control over work units, but you're right it can jump to a different project and leave a work unit for a previous project in a half completed state.
You can specify resource share within the boinc projects, so as to prioritize one project over another but you'll still get the half-way work unit issue.
I don't see any true value in integrating social media into the BOINC client, although a BOINC volunteer running updates on the network on some social media platforms could do wonders. Things such a users being published in highly regarded academic journals could be leveraged far more than they are.
With respect to the BOINC client, some things I would love to see:
More meaningful integration of resource share. As it stands, this function only seems useful if left to run over a long time and if the projects you work on do not change their work units. It would be great to see a feature that lets us set the manager to finish all jobs for project 1, THEN move on and do project 2, etc. If any jobs for projects higher up the chain appear, stop and do them first.
Manual hardlocking of the CPID. I have shown that this can be done by manually editing the data files, and that this can influence the CPIDs registered on project servers. Lets end this CPID nightmare and just let users lock their CPID on the client. To prevent a CPID being stolen or used by another party, tie it to the user login. Even better, give them a private key that is needed to lock a specific CPID.
To truly put BOINC on the map, it needs to do something remarkable. If SETI discovers an alien signal, or if Einstein finds an unknown stellar phenomina, or is SRBase or PrimeGrid finds the largest public megaprime. When this happens, lets hope there are existing channels in place to leverage such a discovery.
Anyway, I adore BOINC. This was intended as constructive idea as requested. Even if none of this is ever implemented, the platform will hold my loyalty.
+1 more resource utilization control
+1 CPID locking
I think that a simple drop-down menu linking to some team-neutral platforms wouldn't hurt, perhaps full integration like auto-tweeting would be more appropriate within individual BOINC project websites rather than within the client.
hmmm
personally, I struggle to see the benefits integrated social media brings to any endeavor -- even drop down menus. if people are visiting hubs of information directly from the client... your branding might not be good enough! =p.
social media, as I see it, doesn't produce anything of value and more often than not reduces value (you have to go viral to benefit and you're more likely to get a trollbox than a virus). social media is all about hype and nothing else while BOINC is an established producer of results.
the benefits of integrating social media might not be worth the damage that integration could do to BOINC's reputation
that said, my views are obviously tainted with bad experiences, and what you're talking about seems to be different than my experiences. so if you, @cm-steem, can clarify what integrated social media might look like, I'm all ears.
Directing thousands of users to the #boinc sub-steemit page, or to /r/boinc on reddit, or to the BOINC telegram group could help grow the team-neutral BOINC communities (which are currently lacking). We really need to get the whole of the BOINC community to interact with one another instead of acting aggressively to each other because of 'team poaching' on their team forums.
Are you referring to Gridcoin with this?
BOINC itself can be taken from cold to fully functional and running work units in 2 minutes flat.
i think you both might suffer from the curse of experience = ). setting up and using BOINC is a multi platform experience -- gui, project websites, simplified view, advanced view. I have never walked someone through setting up BOINC and heard them say "wow! that was easy!" then checking in a week later I rarely hear "yeah i learned so much more!"
Yeah, setting up BOINC and getting it crunching a project doesn't take long at all.. perhaps it'd be better if the client highlighted the most compatible projects for your computer so as to prevent trying to run an nVidia project on an AMD rig?
Integration of social media to once a month post an update of the user's crunching contributions? Could be a great way to get many users constantly tweeting about BOINC, sort of like the thunderclap idea..
I would like to have an option that stops computing when a temperature limit is reached by CPU or GPU, like in the Android version.
A control for setting a maximum work load for the GPU would be interesting too, because I have find out that my computer crash if I am doing anything while GPU computing is active.
TThrottle already provides basic temperature controls for BOINC computation.
I would like to use boinc to mine, witness, and contribute to science all at the same time!
I'd honestly like to see a way to add an account manager through the simple view. I don't like having to cancel out of the default prompt when opening BOINC for the first time that asks you to join a project, but doesn't let you join a manager instead.
To make it easier to setup and earn gridcoin rewards for mining. I spent a few hours following the directions though I was doing it right since my magnitude went up but I never got any coins ?
You need to stake a block in order to earn your rewards. This thread is specifically for BOINC improvements, not Gridcoin though. Do you have any questions/issues regarding staking?