Does anybody know of any free/OSS software for volunteer/distributed computing aside from !boinc@sopuli.xyz? I’ve tried setting up BOINC server side and man is it frustratingly complex even for somebody with sysadmin experience.

There’s a lot of under-utilized hardware out there, and there’s a lot of people who will donate their CPU cycles to scientific research or other volunteer computing projects, but complexity of the BOINC server-side software creates a very high barrier to entry to scientists.

I know that HTCCondor exists, but if I understand correctly, you need to be able to somewhat trust the hosts which do your compute. I’m also aware of various client software (folding@home etc) but I am looking for server-side software.

Ideal situation:

  • Can distribute workunits to clients on a variety of OS and hardware platforms. Obviously the server operator would need to make an app that can work cross-platform or make different versions of the app for each platform.
  • Can validate workunits either using its own simple validation or passing the workunit to a custom validation script you write