Folding/volunteer computing projects that utilizes network connection bandwidth

kasdashd · April 23

Are there any folding/volunteer computing projects that utilize the idle network connection bandwidth from like a fiber optic gigabit connection for science or anthing else?

Most of the time, my fiber optic gigabit connection isn't being used for anything, so I others could utilize that idle network bandwidth, just like folding@home and Boinc utilize the CPU and GPU, that would be awesome.

But is this even possible with some type of software, or can you host a server that helps out research using your network connection or something, just curious?

Really wanna use my idle network bandwidth for something useful/productive.

Levent · April 23

You can always seed Linux distributions using any other BitTorrent client if you have more bandwidth than you need.

OddOod · April 23

Hosting opensource P2P file shares is a pretty good way to contribute bandwidth.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1176457/the-best-resources-to-get-involved-in-p2p-file-sharing-project

I always have a pretty recent siterip of .en and .ru wikipedia seeding as well as a couple *actual* linux ISOs

kasdashd · April 23

21 minutes ago, Levent said:

You can always seed Linux distributions using any other BitTorrent client if you have more bandwidth than you need.

Don't know what this is. How does it work exactly?

Alex Atkin UK · April 23

You have to be careful with this sort of thing. Your ISP is not selling you a connection that is meant to be maxed out all the time, its being sold based on the fact it wont be, as the combined available bandwidth will be much less than all customers combined.

If you max it out continually during peak hours, you're going to be slowing down other customers connections and the ISP will not be happy.

If you only do it during quiet times when everyone is asleep, they probably wont care however.

eg Soon I will be able to buy 1.8Gbit, but that is effectively shared between 30 customers on my fibre segment, which in turn there could be hundreds of customers only on a 10Gbit backhaul link further down the network. I'm effectively being allowed to use ALL the bandwidth on my segment of the network, as its not expected I would ever do so for long periods so it wont impact other customers.