I am currently trying to get a pilot going to utilize BOINC on federal workstations. As part of this I need to gather some budgetary advantages. I've been doing some research but I haven't been able to find the info I need.

Do you know what if any of the BOINC projects are at least partially funded via grants by the U.S. Federal Government. I am hoping to take advantage of unused government computer resources to help processing on the projects that are funded by the US government.

jason(dot)richardson at kcc (dot) usda (dot) gov

Orbit@home was funded entirely by a grant from NASA but last year's application for more funding was denied so that project is on hiatus at the moment. I was going to say Orbit would thus be a bad example to use but when you think about it, it might be the perfect example as the government loves spending money on projects that do nothing and provide no return.

A number of BOINC projects are funded by NSF (National Science Foundation). I'm not sure but doesn't NSF get a lot of their money from the US fed. gov.? The most notorious amongst these would be SETI and there is already a movement afoot to have NSF cut funding to SETI since it doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever finding an ET. Not sure how that affects you. Other projects are funded by NSF, for example Einstein@home.

Other projects are sponsored by state or private universities and post-secondary institutions. I'm not a US citizen so I'm not sure how funding works in those cases. I know primary and secondary schools are funded federally, not sure about post-secondary institutions. If they are funded entirely by state taxes, then you might argue that the feds could extend some good will to the states at very little cost to them (the hardware is already bought and paid for, it's just a matter of paying the power bill).

I wish I could give you a list but you could quickly visit each project's homepage where at the bottom they frequently mention who sponsors/funds them.

Thank you for the reply.

So far in the last year my government workstation has created 165,398.81 points just while running when I was in meetings and during lunch, this in effect was a reduction in government waste of resources. Now imagine if this was spread throughout even a few governmental offices and agencies. It would be a government that is investing in itself and its citizens and all of humanity. It could help in the long term reduce cost of medicare and medicaid if the health research projects are successfull.


I ran into some road blocks to get BOINC as an allowed optional software package that is available for government employee's to maximize the unused processing times of our workstations. The directors after a year of pre-cerfitication process testing of running Boinc on my workstation has told me to uninstall it. The testing was a success, but the directors are worried about public perception and legalities and other governmental issues. So unfortunately I will be uninstalling BOINC from my government workstation today.

However, I have recently discovered an alternate process that make take year(s) to get through and I will be starting the process in the next few days. So hopefully I can get the process going to help the government in the long run to invest its unused processing power to help reduce the federal budget and invest in the advancement of the country.

I am also a member of the National Treasury Employee's Union (NTEU), and I am starting a draft paper that hopefully I can get the national chapter to send out to the approximately 300,000 members a notice about the existence of BOINC and how they can help find cures for cancer, malaria and also help in the scientific projects that aren't health related.


Just a side note: I realize there may be for some political reasons, peopel who do not support my efforts. I want to make it clear that it is not my intent to upset or offend these people. I want to let those people know that I am following all governmental policies and procedures.

Feel free to PM me any concerns or advice you have, so I can address them in my inititives. I will appreciate any throughts that you have. There are also some non-technical issues that I will have to address in the Federal Agency inititiave that I will be starting. It will be a long process.

Some technical concerns that I have been researching are:
Boinc Usage of Network Traffic
Overall BOINC Security

The attitude that thwarts you is rampant, pervasive. Nobody has the courage so speak up, call a spade a spade and take action that hurts nobody and helps everybody. We have become nothings in a bowl of homogenized pap where uniformity and conformity rule. Say nothing that departs from the creed and do nothing in the interests of safety, if nobody moves nobody can get hurt. Sad. We blame it on government but really it's our own intolerance and jealousy of anyone who is successful that causes it. For refusing to cave in to that pressure you are a true patriot.

You have a long road ahead of you and I wish you well. You realize that when the politicians get wind of this they'll spend 2 years with their thumbs up their butts waiting for somebody to tell them whether it is acceptable to believe BOINC is generally a good thing. If it is deemed acceptable to speak up and say it is a good thing there will be a long and bitter argument between Democrats and Republicans concerning which party first thought of considering BOINC for use on gov't computers.

I would suggest the fact that BOINC passed the preliminary testing you mentioned is a positive thing you can mention further up the ladder. It sounds like the people doing the testing approve on a technical level but they won't risk you using BOINC to aid research in anything that is associated with political controversy. So use their "approval on a tech level" to your benefit, milk it for all its worth, and let the higher authorities deal with the political aspects.

As for security, using BOINC is a thousand times more safe than say using a web browser to go sniffing around the 'net and sticking your digital nose in whatever unknown, virus infected site run by whatever den of pirates and scammers you may have. BOINC doesn't communicate with just any old website, it connects with project sites that are generally known to the BOINC community. Moreover, those sites are usually run by admins who have more than the average ability with computers and security issues. On top of that you can install BOINC to run in PAE mode adds so the security. In all the years I have run BOINC I have never heard of a single case where it was confirmed BOINC spread a virus to someone's machine or caused any security problem. There have been concerns and investigations and false positives from anti-virus software but no confirmed cases. When you think about it, the mechanisms used to spread virii just aren't there in the BOINC paradigm or are very ineffective.

Regarding network traffic, some projects upload/download far more traffic than others. If it's a concern then limit BOINC to crunching projects that require minimal uploads and downloads.

I talked with my director today and in order to proceed i need to find at least 1 BOINC supported project that is at at the minimum partially funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture or one of its sub-agencies or offices. We have to provide proof that the software will directly support the mission of the USDA.

So I will have a lot of contacting to do for each of the projects that run under BOINC.

This page has a list of many of the USDA Agencies. So if any of you reading this can find any connection please let me know.

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/usdahome?navtype=MA&navid=AGENCIES_OFFICES_C

Go for it!

Years ago I was a federal employee myself. Back at that time they had a program for employees to submit ideas to help save money, to improve the environment or whatever and it was sending in ideas no matter how wild and crazy that make differences.

This program we are already participating in does make a difference and one aspect that I like about it is that I may not be able to donate a lot of funds directly to many projects but I can donate the unused time of my computer to these projects and who knows, maybe that time I donated will make a scientific breakthru that will be a while lot more important that a cash donation I might have made would have been...and there is a chance it could be traced back to my computer where the cash is just case and probably would never be known where it came from.

Good luck with your submission!

hello smalltalk

Climate Prediction (cpdn) is not funded by the USDA, but it is doing research on Weather, which affects most of the Agriculture in the US...


Frank

Thanks for the reply. I am still working to get BOINC into the USDA for research purposes and for supporting the USDA mission.

http://volunteer.cs.und.edu/wildlife/ looks like a great candidate. Perhaps contacting them on if there is any connection.

There WAS also Virtual Prairie, at the University of Houston... Though no activity for some years.

http://vcsc.cs.uh.edu/virtual-prairie/index.php

I would be interested in hearing about your progress, I think BOINC is a perfect fit for large institutions to not only make use of their vast computational resources for some of their own purposes, but for contributions to the community as well. I had BOINC deployed on a small scale when I was an IT at a local school district, though I was laid off before I could make a proposal for wider use. I am also a bit familiar with the hurdles you're facing; we've been trying to get approval to use some mapping software on our field laptops, which aren't even connected to the government network. Even though it was produced for another branch of the DoD, it doesn't have approval in our branch and therefore must go through all of the same testing procedures that it already endured before being deployed by its original user.

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