Although such infrastructures cannot be a priori trusted, CloudAgora offers mechanisms to ensure the verifiable validity of the outsourced storage and computation, discourage potential providers from behaving maliciously, and incentivize participants to play fair. On one hand, cloud consumers have the chance to request storage or compute resources, upload data, and outsource task processing over remote, fully distributed infrastructures. The key enabler of the platform is Blockchain technology, which is used to record commitment policies through the use of smart contracts, publicly verify off-chain services, both storage and computation related, and trigger automatic micropayments. To tackle this monopoly and empower the democratization and full decentralization of the cloud computing market, we present CloudAgora, a platform that enables any potential resource provider, ranging from individuals to large companies, to monetize idle resources competing on equal terms, and allows any cloud consumer to enjoy access to low-cost storage and computation without having to trust any central authority. As a result, the few, blindly and perforce trusted entities define the prices and manage to gain a significant competitive advantage by exploiting the knowledge derived by users’ data and computations. That's pretty much a no-brainer.Cloud computing offerings traditionally originate from a handful of large and well established providers, which monopolize the market, preventing small players and individuals from having a share. Instead they can use BOINC and spend the time and money on the actual project. How many of the current projects would be up and running if each one had to waste the time and money writing programs to harness that power, or, if they had to pay for that processing power? I'd guess that most wouldn't be. Many of the current projects may only produce results of interest to a hand full of people in a specific field, or, one of them might produce a result that could change our lives in ways we can't even imagine at the present time!ĭoes BOINC help science projects? Certainly it does! While it is far from perfect, BOINC allows any project the chance to tap into huge amounts of computing power. The main thing is that we increase the knowledge base and in so doing increase our overall understanding of how, and why, things work. That's not to say the work is worthless, it's just that we may not know what to do with the results at the present time. In the first place, many research projects never produce "practical" results. A read of Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen's book "The Collapse Of Chaos" would educate him handsomely.Ĭome in to the lion's den ( a board of one of the BOINC projects ) and ask around! Warn him that he'd have to do better than pure gainsay to be taken too seriously though! The problems require the combined resources that BOINC enables, to even to begin making some headway into! Those problems are not 'linear model thinking' and possess an intrinsic complexity. Suggest that he do some homework ( don't hand him anything, he sounds like one who needs to do some genuine thinking & searching here ) on (A) the history of BOINC and (B) the history of science generally.Įxplain that, by definition really, BOINC is applied to science research that is actually quite hard. Well, I guess it depends how (im)polite you want to be! :-)Īsk him why he's sitting on top of the industrial stack, enjoying it's benefits ( including his own health ) and popping the dumb question "what have the Roman's done for us?". Quote: I have a computer science student friend. HIM(4:22:54 PM): but that research, at the moment, is not really being applied, and as far as i know, aside from the climate change one (the results of which have been disputed) nothing practical has come out of it HIM(4:10:37 PM): for rosetta, i can't find any HIM(4:10:30 PM): but when you look at all these projects, what are their results? ME(4:12:11 PM): again - WHY would rosetta (for example) make and maintain a project for NO REASON? They MUST be getting something useful from the project or they wouldn't do it! ME(4:08:52 PM): this is one of the two i run: HIM(4:06:48 PM): like i said before, it helps computer science a lot more than medicine HIM(4:06:21 PM): you're just lucky i don't try to explain how boinc actually doesn't help anyone ME(4:06:19 PM): as a computer scientist you should think DC/boinc is neat! What can I say to convince him? A project scientist chiming in would be neat too ) I just had a conversation with him where he claims BOINC doesn't help science or scientists! I'll quote the coversation, in part, below (with his name removed, of course). I have a computer science student friend who pokes fun at me for taking BOINC so seriously.
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