I work at an open science NGO that has been approached by a developer who is interested in making a public portal [email protected] BOINC project. The basic idea is that scientific researchers could submit workunits for a number of popular science apps (molecular modeling etc) to be distributed and crunched by volunteers using BOINC. Essentially, a way for them to harness the petaflops of free processing power offered by the BOINC network without having to run their own BOINC server.

In order to make the proof-of-concept, we are looking for an science app which:

• Is open source and runs on Linux
• Has a large userbase
• Has no way to get access to compute power for it for free or cheap without making your own HPC cluster or other work distribution system
• Takes a long compute time and takes at least a couple hours to run on a standard consumer machine
• Can have tasks split into smaller sub-tasks to be run on several machines

Bonus points for:

• Tasks have a determinate output, meaning the results are the same for a given task no matter what kind of computer they are run on. This makes it easy to verify the work is done correctly by simply making sure two tasks have the same output.
• App that is cross-discipline (applicable to multiple areas of science) or relevant to biology/health research

Any suggestions?

If you would be interested in helping with development for this project (Python/React, Remix (Vercel or Netlify)) let us know too