Without SIMAP, BOINC will never be the same. . . .



After extensive tests and evaluations during the last months it turned out that the best way to continue SIMAP will be to use dedicated local hardware in our institute. SIMAP will therefore use BOINC only to maintain the current SIMAP database until the end of 2014. BOINC clients for the new SIMAP database will not be released and there will be no workunits for SIMAP after 2014. After 10 very successful years of SIMAP within BOINC this decision was not an easy one for us. However, we thank all users for their support in the past and in the upcoming last period until the end of the year.

So why did this happen?
Simap was one of the most popular projects.
I think we can draw some conclusions.
And the most significant of them - using Boink, scientists did not get the computing power they hoped to get.

*but now we have BU@home... it seems we are slowly moving towards BelgianBeer@home.

Most likely due to a decline in active users, even over the past 60 days they have declined from over 11,500 to 9,900. I think that's a trend that more projects will be seeing as fewer people are interested in BOINC overall, and a lot of people are finding their computing needs met by mobile devices. I have been recently trying to get people I know involved with BOINC, when I tell them about what it does they either think I'm totally crazy/excessively nerdy, or just don't seem to care about helping out.

It was a good run. I doubt we'll ever see a project that will have direct support for such a wide variety of operating systems and hardware.

The old website and forums have been replaced by those of the new, non-BOINC project. So, I guess it's time to retire this one for good. Perhaps there will be a time in the future when they decide to bring us back in the fold for some more BOINC computing.

Rest in Peace,
Similarity Matrix of Proteins "SIMAP"
2004-2014

SIMAP 1



Ref.: SIMAP - The similarity matrix of proteins