Anyone heard about Gridfinity (http://www.gridfinity.com) yet? New company that has a BOINC project where you get paid for doing workunits (deposits through paypal). The idea seems to be that they're acting as a intermediary between BOINC users and companies who would want to buy computing time. It's kind of interesting to see a commercial use of BOINC still using public computing. Seems like if something like this were to get big enough, it could definitely serve as an alternative to an industry running its own cluster.

I had thought of doing this, but the big problem is with the security of the data and applications. For the kind of volunteer science BOINC is mostly used for this is not a problem, but for a company to pay for computing, they will be uneasy about releasing data or algorithms out in the wild, unless it's the kind of problem where this would not matter much. Still, it's an interesting idea.

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-- Eric Myers

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -- William Butler Yeats

I do want to put a warning down here. Reading the site, Gridfinity isn't using the BOINC client by much. You can't attach to them in any way with BOINC. It runs stand alone.

When you download the Gridfinity software, it will remain running silently on your computer, periodically checking in with the Gridfinity servers for work. By default, Gridfinity will only be active when you are not using the computer. Whenever there is work to be done, the Gridfinity program will automatically download the necessary programs, "crunch the numbers", and send the results back to our servers.

Gridfinity's underlying client is derived from the open source project BOINC.

It says this on their web page.

This thread will stay here as a discussion thread about Gridfinity, but it's the only thread we allow to exist on these boards. We don't give out help to Gridfinity people.

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Hi,

Actually I think you can attach to them via Boinc instead of their custom-client judging from this forum post by the admin:

https://www.gridfinity.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=32#32

You only really need to download and use the Gridfinity client if you don't already have BOINC. If BOINC is already running, Gridfinity will just try to use that existing BOINC session. If not, it will try to start its own BOINC session. ...

I'm not sure that they really follow the spirit of Boinc though.

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