Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Forbo 1941 days ago
Considering the number of supercomputers that have been constructed since the days of ENIAC, I don't think we'll be running out of scientific computing problems any time soon. And if we somehow do manage to run out of computing problems, then I guess we've already succeeded.
2 comments
fsflover 1941 days ago
But can you change the task underlying your cryptocurrency without breaking the network?
link
ilammy 1941 days ago
If the network has been designed for this in the first place – why shouldn't you be able to?

With Gridcoin you can participate in a number of eligible BOINC projects [1] and get rewards for computing on any of them. The network can add or remove projects.

[1]: https://gridcoin.ddns.net/pages/project-list.php

link
zekrioca 1940 days ago
I'm wondering why you think supercomputers are actually built for. Besides that, the type of computational problems that are submitted to and that BOINC helps solving are different to those that a supercomputer solves. The former (known as High Throughput Computing, HTC) is concerned mainly -- as the name suggests -- with throughput, while the latter (High Performance Computing, HPC) with speed/latency.

There is a reason why Cloud providers do not yet have "real" HPC offerings (i.e., performance-wise), even though with all the marketing they do to appear otherwise..

link
Forbo 1940 days ago
Sorry I didn't specify. There's still plenty of demand for HTC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distributed_computing_...

link