In looking at more than a few of the projects, many have few or no updates. Is the BOINC model of distributed computing basically dead or dying? Has power saving killed it? It appears as though a few dedicated volunteers keep project pages minimally alive, but there are virtually no recent (less than a year old) updates, publications, posts from project owners, or info on data collection - just stats on processing. Where does the data come from that creates the work units? What are the outputs? Are my cycles simply re-processing work units from 2009 that have been processed millions of times already?

I don't think so. The major projects are here to stay (SETI, CPDN, Rosetta, Einstein, WCG, LHC/CERN, and Milkyway) to name a few. There are a few other projects that will continue to hang on by their fingernails. Another 40 to 50 projects will come and go. Some college ones are often run by undergrads with little IT backup and no way to pass the project on. Others are just individuals running on home systems.

As long as it is cheaper and easier to do data analysis on home CPU/GPU, BOINC itself isn't going to disappear anytime in the foreseeable future.

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Boinc V 7.4.36
Win7 i5 3.33G 4GB NVidia 470

Hey Mark,

Not sure which projects your refering to but we are still alive and kicking at theSkyNet
http://pogs.theskynet.org/pogs/forum_forum.php?id=1
http://www.theskynet.org/news

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Cheers
Alex
theSkyNet.org Webmaster

but there are virtually no recent (less than a year old) updates, publications, posts from project owners, or info on data collection

I've made recently a BIG update to publications list here...

I think this is one of the reasons IBM came up with/backed World Community Grid. Many research projects are of the "One and Done" nature. WCG provides a framework for those projects to rotate through without having to have users "find" them. A few months ago I looked at the WCG Web site and they listed projects which completed and were upcoming.

It is not that the model is dead, just so many projects are of a limited lifespan.

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Just adding some more projects:

NumberFields@Home
MindModeling@Home (BETA)
BURP
CSG
FiND@Home
Malariacontrol
Primegrid
YOYO
And the newest: DENIS@Home

BOINC, better distributed computing, will never end.
It much easier and cheaper to run an BOINC Server, than an Supercomputer-Cluster.
The whole computing time from BOINC is 7,6 PetaFLOPS; the biggest Suppercomputer from Germany (#8 international) has "only" 5 PetaFLOPS (Rmax)
http://www.top500.org/system/177722

I started an "little" challenge last year for DC, check http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=9717#57521

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I'm sure the output could be much higher, if we got more people involved--but I think that such things are probably outside the field of consideration for the majority of computer users. Installing, managing and using BOINC probably sounds too "nerdy" to them, or we haven't leveraged the right cause to attract their attention.

That's probably where the Samsung and HTC apps that are BOINC-based come from, trying to broaden the appeal and take some of the work out of selecting apps and configuring your client. To my knowledge, WCG is the only project that's tried anything remotely like that on the desktop/laptop side by promoting their own branded version of the client.

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My Detailed BOINC Stats

Sony did it earlier.

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Boinc is not dead. Its now about mobile. Googles Project Tango is the future of Mobile devices. The compute on these tablets with hardware acceleration is impressive.
https://www.google.com/atap/project-tango/