New Seti@Home Client to be Open to Other Projects

An anonymous reader writes "Seti@home is preparing to make a major change to their client and backend. The new system "boinc" will be a general purpose client and accept work units from other projects (selected by the user). This will open-up Seti@Home's millions strong user base to academic projects that cannot afford supercomputers. As boinc is an open source framework other distributed projects (think!, folding@home etc) will also be able to use it giving boinc a larger installed base than Seti@Home."

Comments

Authentification

[Angram]

What kind of authentication process will be in place? Basically, what will stop someone from using this for illegal/dishonest purposes under the guise of academic research? Will this be exploitable for virus/spam propogation?

I think theres better distributed computing causes

[Jonas the Bold]

Not cooler, but better. More important ones, like folding, for instance. A very (VERY) small chance of finding intelligent life out there isn't quite worth it, I don't think.

Time == money

[Dancin_Santa]

Unless you give it away for free.

Is the cost of power that you use while you are running these programs tax-deductible?

Doing something out of the goodness of your heart is awfully sweet. Getting the government to lower your taxes because of it is sweeter.

So basically...

[GrodinTierce]

they're going to do what distributed.net has already done, provide a client that can work on multiple projects, chosen by the user. Oh well, in this game I suppose it's really the size of your user base that matters.