BOINC & Einstein for high school science project?

The official BOINC system requirements cover most projects. It seems to me that a sizeable credit requirement would only be fair if the students will be using more or less identical systems in a lab or classroom; if using their own systems of varying age (and in varying numbers), I’d suggest something pretty minimal, representing a few days’ worth on a fast system but feasible to achieve within a few weeks by an old clunker that’s only turned on a few hours a day. At any rate, in the latter case the differences among projects’ CS/CPUh rates (a factor no more than two or three in the extreme cases) is likely to be considerably outweighed by performance differences among hosts.

For a physics class I’d expect the focus to be on physics-related projects. There’s nothing to stop you from encouraging the students to continue contributing on their own when the class project is finished, to whatever projects they choose—or that you recommend.

That doesn’t make any sense to me: what kind of “credit� are we talking about? If it’s not a BOINC project there’s no reason to expect it even to have comparable metrics, let alone an interchangeable ‘currency’. BOINC’s cobblestones are theoretically convertible to a certain number of computations or CPU-hours on a reference machine. The original SETI@home counted tasks returned and CPU-time contributed. Evolution@home (the only other non-BOINC DC project I’ve contributed to) counts CPU-time, RAM committed, simulations run and “giga-individuals� processed. If you’re looking beyond BOINC you’ll have to devise your own means of evaluating the students’ participation for the purposes of quantitative comparisons.

BTW a good collection of links to DC projects is at distributedcomputing•info. There aren’t many non-BOINC projects in physics or earth sciences, but there are lots of mathematical ones. Wikipedia has a sizeable list.

I should think the amount of research the students do into the goals and methods of the projects they join considerably more important than how much crunching they do. I’d suggest a report somewhat longer than one page: perhaps a half a page of ‘boilerplate’ (project name, who administers and hosts it, short description of the project’s goals in the student’s own words, likewise for the nature of the data-processing) followed by a longer (500-word?) account of their participation, whether devoted to scientific & technical matters or more personal in content.

Not many, but you could require them to join a school or class team (you can set up a BOINC-wide one now), which would make it easier to monitor them on the Web. You should probably prohibit hiding of computers—which setting can be checked on practically any of the statistics sites, as well as in the public account page on specific project sites.

BOINC message boards

You have to register to post there; the site is set up just like a ‘real’ project.