SETIng Your Priorities: How to Avoid Burnout When Doing Voluntary Computing
Nature is truly healing: not only beavers returned to the Moika River in St. Petersburg, but public interest for voluntary distributed computing projects is back, too. However, this article isn’t aimed at describing any of the voluntary distributed computing initiatives everyone knows about.
Uliana Malysheva, technical writer at Selectel, talked to the heads of several distributed computing projects, crunchers (the industry-specific nickname for volunteers), and even the administrator of the Russian BOINC website. What attracts and what discourages this kind of volunteerism? Why did the “golden age” of voluntary computing in Russia end in 2010? Are there any projects you may not know about, even if you have been in the know for a while? Keep on reading, and you’ll get your answers.
We have compiled a mini cruncher vocabulary for those unfamiliar with the basic concepts of voluntary distributed computing.
In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic sparked a new wave of interest in voluntary distributed computing. The Folding@home project, currently researching SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), has bypassed all supercomputers in the world’s top 500 by overall performance.
As of May, it amassed capacity equal to 2.3 exaFLOPs, both individual volunteers and businesses having invested in the project. VMware not only allocated computing resources to the project but also made it possible to connect to Folding@Home via vSphere. Selectel, in turn, donated the capacity of their servers equipped with NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 1080 graphics accelerators.
By the way, the world’s first exaFLOP computer was due in 2021. Intel promised to build a machine that would be capable of a quintillion operations per second. It seems as though it isn’t going to be more powerful than the distributed “computer” FLOP-picked by Folding@home.
Success factors
Folding@home is phenomenal, as far as voluntary computing projects go, seeing as many of those are satisfied with just a few teraFLOPs. There are several reasons for this success.
The issue is understandable and topical. The Coronavirus has affected everyone. Oftentimes, projects on the BOINC platform are criticized for unclear research goals and issues when bringing the results to practice.
The media helps spread the information. In the world of voluntary computing projects, there are stars — SETI@home, Rosetta@home, Einstein@home. At the same time, up to 80–85% of other initiatives never go beyond forums and pages on the BOINC website.
The results are reported. Folding@home is constantly in contact with volunteers, and scientists are willing to report on the work done. Lack of news about the project is one of the reasons crunchers lose their interest for voluntary computing.
The project is cross-platform. The Folding@home client can be downloaded for Windows, macOS, and a number of Linux distros.
Another two frequent reasons for skepticism about voluntary computing are issues for Folding@home, too. However, they are offset by the project’s social weight.
The result is not guaranteed (or it may take a long time). Indeed, many voluntary computing projects have been running for over a decade. However, very few things have been achieved over these years that people can understand.
Alexander Andreyev, administrator of the Russian BOINC website
People want impressive results. SETI@home executives have yet to find any aliens, and Rosetta@home initiators have not discovered the universal vaccine. This becomes an argument in favor of deeming voluntary computing projects ineffective. However, it is important to understand that science is often about small steps and unobvious discoveries. For example, in the course of the Einstein@home project, scientists did not record any gravity waves, but as a side effect, they learned to discover new pulsars. In addition to that, calculations carried out as part of the LHC@home project helped the operation of the Large Hadron Collider a lot. Any intermediate results of the projects are worked on and feature in scientific publications. The issue is that, unfortunately, not all projects find time to notify us about the results.
Significant energy consumption. Voluntary computing also gets criticized for unprofitability. Projects often recommend donating GPU computing capacity; in such cases, work units are computed faster, but it also consumes a lot of energy. This issue, however, becomes a big annoyance when volunteers lose the incentive to participate in projects.
Answering the skeptics
According to data as of June 9, 2020, the number of active BOINC participants is 105,790 people with 727,784 computers connected. Over 70 new volunteers have joined the community on this day alone.
Participation in voluntary computing projects is not always about being rational. We interviewed several crunchers to find out what motivates them to join the initiatives despite their obvious shortcomings.
A sense of contribution to science
Participation in projects gives one a sense of involvement in the solution of one of humanity’s complex issues, be it a mathematical problem or a socially-charged challenge.
Dmitry Kostryukov, Senior Systems Engineer at Selectel, a cruncher for 9 years
I joined BOINC about 9 years ago, connecting not only my PC, but also my mobile phone. Back then, I chose to participate in Folding@home and Rosetta@home. The very idea of voluntary distributed computing was my motivation. To think that with minimal cost, literally by crowdfunding, we could solve scientific problems that would improve the life of mankind in the future! I was also irritated by the fact that I had a cool piece of technology at my disposal — my laptop, but its power would all too often be wasted on launching Chrome and downloading Google Sheets. I wanted to get more value out of the technology packed into modern gadgets. After all, calculations for spaceflights were done on much less powerful processors back in the day, and “640 Kb was enough for everyone”.
Getting personal bonuses and recognition
Active (and even passive) participants can receive certificates confirming their contribution to science. Also, most projects award crunchers with badges depending on the amount of “investment” one has made in the project and the results of this contribution. Any participant can hit the project’s top and become a “user of the day”. There is also a cross-project non-team ranking, and being listed there is a special honor.
Nataliya Nikitina, researcher, Telecommunication Systems Laboratory of the Institute of Applied Mathematical Research at the Karelian Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, head of RakeSearch (BOINC)
All project participants are automatically included in the overall ranking by invested capacity. Such rankings are standard for the BOINC community. Personal achievements are saved forever, which is also important for many people in the community. People can see that there are a wide variety of computational tasks and that they can be successfully solved through the use of certain algorithms. Even a small contribution is important and can lead to a successful result. The owners of computers on which small but significant discoveries have been made are awarded badges, different every month.
Community involvement, rankings, and race for credits
The BOINC platform hosts both challenges and full-fledged championships. Every year a Formula 1 championship for crunchers, Formula BOINC, is held, where teams compete by the amount of capacity invested in projects.
The championship consists of a marathon and sprints. The marathon takes into account the points received for all kinds of team participation in BOINC projects. The sprints mean the teams concentrate on one project, announced 24 hours before the start. This way, the platform draws the community’s attention to all initiatives and not just to those that offer the biggest benefits from participation.
There are also several Russian teams in BOINC. One of the biggest is the Russia Team. It currently has 2,388 participants, of whom 164 are active. The Russian cruncher group is 32nd in the ranking that includes over 100,000 teams from around the world.
Alexander Andreyev, administrator of the Russian BOINC website
In the “golden age” of distributed computing in Russia, the 2000s, starting a new team was a big event. There were plans to form a national team. We were planning tactics to take the lead. Every team worth its salt had a website and a forum. Of course, there will always be those who think such competitions are far from science, and that they undermine the very idea of voluntary computing. On the other hand, the desire to be a member of a group (in MMO games, a guild or a clan) is a natural social need of a person.
Nikita Kunetz, system administrator at Selectel, a cruncher for 4 years
For some people, such game-like aspects are extra motivation to participate in voluntary computing projects. I decided a year ago that it wasn’t the biggest thing for me. I donated my resources to Science United, the project that aggregates research in different scientific fields. There are no credits, badges, or rankings there. People invest because they simply can and want to.
I don’t ever
The number of participants from Russia who have ever joined BOINC projects is 52,547 at the time of writing. This is approximately 0.4% of the country’s total population. The number of active participants is even lower, floating around 1,300–1,400. Russia’s global BOINC position based on RAC is 33 (out of 277 countries represented on the platform).
Obviously, this kind of volunteering is not for everyone. Moreover, beginner crunchers often experience a rapid decline in motivation: they download software, spent just a week crunching tasks, and pull the plug.
How to avoid burning out early and cope with common problems newcomers face? We made a list of tips together with experienced volunteers.
- Get ready for your first user experience being terrible. You see a list of projects, you don’t understand how to get involved, and their pages aren’t much in terms of the user interface. You get used to it when you focus on the benefits you can bring to society.
- You can get familiar with the platform by using the aggregator websites where several studies from different fields of science are presented. You will be able to choose one or two projects to your liking and avoid wasting time on exploring all the existing initiatives.
- Evaluate your capacity. If you only spend half an hour a day running the calculations, you will not be helping much. This isn’t enough for your computer to complete the task set by the project. Intermediate results do not count and are not saved. So, if you got assigned a work unit but your computer failed to complete calculations in the time you allocated, then your processor has just heated up some air fruitlessly. An unfinished task is simply transferred to another user, and all calculations are redone from scratch.
- When choosing projects, consider smaller ones. Everyone knows about Folding@home and Rosetta@home, of course. But even they have a limited number of tasks, so you may just not be getting tasks at all or getting them rarely.
- At first, your credit counter may not be growing too fast. Do not be disappointed and do not give up volunteering. Think of it as a long-term investment, and try different projects. At some point, you will find your perfect formula for contributing resources, and you will rejoice over small victories.
- If your home PC has an NVIDIA graphics card, some projects can run on it with calculations getting done much faster. It can also help you heat up your room in winter as a bonus (joke!).
- We jest, of course, but if your computer warms up a lot, think about optimization. By default, BOINC will use 100% of your CPU. However, in the client settings, you can lower this value to a more comfortable 80% or another figure. Also, make sure that you only allow the application to run while the CPU is idle.
- A good option is leaving your computer on at night and go to bed. The best option is buying a virtual machine from a cloud provider and running BOINC 24/7 there.
Nikita Kunetz, system administrator at Selectel, a cruncher for 4 years
I have three hosts running in the Cloud Platform exclusively for BOINC calculations. Anybody can do this: get a host somewhere like Selectel Cloud platform, even with minimum specs like 1 CPU, 2 GB RAM, 10 GB HDD, and calculate tasks there. Note, however, that with just a single CPU, tasks will not be processed very quickly. Configuring BOINC in the cloud will be a little more difficult. As a guide, I recommend this article from Arch Wiki.
Anton Kryukov, specialist, VMware Development and Maintenance Department at Selectel
The load would cause my CPU, AMD Ryzen 7 3700x, to overheat up to ~90 degrees Celsius. As a result, I’d have to listen to annoying noise of the cooling system. However, my PC is built in a compact case, and I didn’t choose hardware for a constant load. When I switched to the GPU for calculations, the overheating issue was solved, and the computer is now working at the standard 70–75 degrees Celsius.
