Hi,

Total newb - apologies if this question has been asked a thousand times. I did run a few searches first:

I'm a member of a Greens party. We have websites sitting on crusty old servers with compromised capability and backup. We are relatively rich in potential volunteers - poor in bandwidth to serve web requests, and in hard media for redundancy/backup. It seems like this is not quite the BOINC model - which assumes wealth of volunteers as an antidote to poverty of FLOPS. Is it worthwhile for me to suggest BOINC as an option for a distributed server for the party? Or not the right model?

Many thanks,

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What do you want to use it for, do you have any science to be done? As that's not completely clear from your questions. Sorry to be asking questions immediately and not answering yours, but in my opinion, it depends on the answer to my questions.

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Hi Jord,

No - there's no Science. I'm looking for a cheap way to achieve redundancy and scalability for an existing set of servers where the primary function is to serve websites. My budget for hardware is low - but I have access to volunteers who would offer processing time/hard disk/memory on their PCs. I'm wondering whether I could use BOINC software to turn my potential volunteers' PCs into an asset for the party.

Maybe a political party is not very 'pure' compared with solving AIDS - but we do good work!

Hope I've answered your questions. Best regards,

Joe.

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BOINC isn't an operating system or a way to "add their distinction to your own" (grin). So no, you cannot use it so volunteer's computers take on the role of web-servers / other hardworking hardware for your organization.

It's software that can be used for creating a volunteer computing project, a Virtual Campus Supercomputing Center or for desktop Grid computing. More information, besides in the links already given, can be found here.

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Thanks for your time. I'll have a scratch around the links you provided.

Regards,

Joe.

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