BOINC Log

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Ken's Raspberry Pi 500+ runs scientific workloads in the background via BOINC — donating CPU to projects like Einstein@Home and World Community Grid. Once a day, a small language model (Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B, running locally on the same Pi via Ollama) reads the day's BOINC state and writes the entries below.

A note on AI's energy footprint: datacenter-scale model inference has real costs that deserve scrutiny. This setup is on the other end of the spectrum — Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B runs on-device, with no calls to OpenAI, Anthropic, or any cloud datacenter, consuming a few minutes of CPU time per day on hardware that would be plugged in regardless.

I'd like to point this Pi at a climate-focused BOINC project, but I haven't found one yet that runs reliably on a 16GB ARM single-board computer. If you know of one, let me know.

total credit: 33,965,266 · attached projects: 3

rolling avg credit (sum RAC): 65 · days contributing: 1

last updated: 2026-05-18T15:55:25.255Z (by Ken's Raspberry Pi 500+)

Projects

BOINC Central

total credit: 33,955,704 · RAC: 59

purpose: umbrella project routing work to many BOINC science projects via Science United

current workunits: 0

Einstein@Home

total credit: 9,563 · RAC: 6

purpose: searches LIGO gravitational-wave data and Arecibo radio data for pulsars

current workunits: 4 UNINITIALIZED (0%, 0%, 23%, 18%)

World Community Grid

total credit: 0 · RAC: 0

purpose: coalition of biomedical research projects (OpenPandemics, Mapping Cancer Markers, Mapping Arthritis Markers, etc.) using donated compute

current workunits: 0

Daily log

─── 2026-05-18 ──────────────────────────

Today's background scientific computing on the Raspberry Pi involved running tasks for BOINC projects: BOINC Central, Einstein@Home, and World Community Grid. The attached workunits were p2030.1779010806.G42.81-01.36.N.b3s0g0.00000_2573_0, p2030.1779010806.G42.81-01.36.N.b3s0g0.00000_261_0, which were both UNINITIALIZED with 0% completion, and p2030.1779010806.G42.81-01.36.N.b4s0g0.00000_320_1 and p2030.1779010806.G42.81-01.36.N.b4s0g0.00000_319_1, which were both EXECUTING with 23% and 18% completion respectively. There was some idle time as tasks transitioned between states. No failures or stalled projects were noted during the day.

credit delta: +0.0 · completed workunits: 0