WUProp@Home

WUProp@Home (Work Unit Properties at Home) is a meta-project: it doesn't run scientific simulations of its own. Instead, it collects detailed telemetry about how every other BOINC project's work units behave on every kind of hardware — and publishes the results as a free, open database that project administrators, researchers, and ordinary volunteers can use to understand the state of distributed computing.

For each work unit your computer crunches on any BOINC project, WUProp@Home records what kind of CPU/GPU ran it, how long it took, how much memory and disk it used, how often it checkpointed, how big the upload and download were, and how long the round trip from request to validation took. Aggregated across thousands of volunteers and dozens of projects, this is the most comprehensive view anyone has of real-world volunteer-computing performance — far richer than what any single project's own server-side stats can capture.

The project is operated by Sébastien from the WildWildWest section of L'Alliance Francophone — the venerable French-speaking BOINC team — and has been running continuously since 28 March 2010. It is officially classified as a Non-CPU-Intensive (NCI) project: it uses essentially no CPU (max ~6 MB of RAM, and barely any cycles), so attaching it costs nothing and never competes with your “real” project for resources. You can run it alongside Folding@home, Einstein@Home, anything — and earn 50 credits per day per machine just for being a useful data point.

For the BOINC ecosystem as a whole, WUProp's database is invaluable: project admins use it to see which apps are over-running their estimates, hardware vendors can see real distribution of consumer CPUs and GPUs, and volunteers can compare project efficiency across hardware before committing to one. It's the metadata layer that makes the rest of volunteer computing measurable.