With the inevitable rush to mobile devices in the home and discarding of desktops how will this project maintain its already small active participant base?

Given that mobile GPU's aren't powerfull enough I think this question needs thinking about.

Avid gamers might be the answer but how do you recruit them and stop them from very high overclocking because a game can cope with a few errors but GPUGrid can't.

If this project is to continue you will need to incentivise users to join, participate and stay.

Currently, GPUgrid is the only reason I'm thinking on upgrading my notebook with GT740M to a gaming notebook or to switch to a desktop system.

Even newer notebooks are being made thinner, so they can't dissipate the heat produced by those projects. I had to mod my notebook, so that I can run Boinc without burning. Most users won't even try or think about this.

I think most GPUgrid users know the thing they're doing and will continue the job as long as possible. Otherwise there is no need for most of those people to switch to GTX980's or upcoming 1080's etc. Because cheaper cards can do the same things with some less performance. These contributors are buying expensive graphic cards to run the project, paying high electricity bills; these are already really a small percent of people.

But eventually mobile platforms seem to overcome PC business and then developers will need to look at mobile possibilities. Maybe adapting works to devices with mobile GPUs on ARM CPU's. Many other CPU projects already make use of ARM CPU's on mobile phones etc. However, just mobile phones are not good enough for these projects yet. Not only processing power but also they are being hot, and this puts them in danger of degredation and even battery explosions. I ran Boinc with different projects on mobile phones, and saw CPU temperatures up to 90 degrees. But with time mobile CPU performances will increase and if they can run cooler it may be more possible to run Boinc jobs on mobiles. Also PC business is developing too, newer CPU's and newer GPU's; we'll see what'll happen in the future.

But sometimes I can't even get jobs from the project, sometimes due to amount of jobs, sometimes due to high processing needs of jobs. I think project already can't feed all the GPU's contributing the project.

Hopefully, WU famine will be resolved in coming weeks. A new PHD students starts in June and another at the end of year.

You make very good points in the rest of your post.

Hopefully, WU famine will be resolved in coming weeks. A new PHD students starts in June and another at the end of year.

Hopefully, WU famine will be resolved in coming weeks. A new PHD students starts in June and another at the end of year.

So I'm not the only one who hasn't got any work in the past couple of days?

I don't think mobile platforms are the answer, at least not for another decade, they just cannot come close to coping yet, My 980ti weighs nearly as much as a laptop and will quite easily raise the temperature of an entire room 5-10 degrees. Similar to bit coin miners I wonder if dedicated crunching boxes are an option?

I do think gamers are the best option. I intentionally build my PC to be overkill just for the sake of it, and I started crunching as a sort of benchmark, I feel like it would be easy to convince a lot of people with super machines to contribute.

If feasible I do think perhaps the top/consistant crunchers could occasionally get some free hardware. I'm thinking of building a second machine just for crunching.

Hopefully, WU famine will be resolved in coming weeks. A new PHD students starts in June and another at the end of year.

So I'm not the only one who hasn't got any work in the past couple of days?

Absolutely NOT. Hang on in there.

VR is also going to probably revive the desktop as well.