The Official BOINC news thread

Hi xn!!

Very many thanx for keeping an eye on BOINC developements!!

And, Spectre's *really* moving now!!

Glad I can help put a smile on someone's face. The new "SETI suite" (good term, thanks for it) seems to be working pretty well and doesn't require too much babysitting.
I was hoping to tweak it a bit and try out the BOINC stuff but, as usual, personal issues are going to keep me tied up all weekend.

Hi Spectre!!

Be nice to Bob, yes? I predict *it* will happen tomorrow... Bob deposed... Never thought I'd see it... (JOKE)

[Edited on 12-2-2004 by Genya]

I think it'll be a few days before he's #1. At least 2 days, 3 tops. I wonder what Bob88 is thinking right now, or how he's feeling. I bet he's on his way to the store to buy a few Pentium 4s and Athlon 64s

boinc.ssl.berkeley.edu... has finally been updated. The BOINC core client now provides a set of RPCs allowing separate GUIs to be developed. BOINC now has an anonymous platform mechanism which 1) allows computers of any type to participate in a BOINC project, and 2) allows participants to run only software they have compiled themselves, should they so desire. BOINC is being used at the Scripps Research Institute to run a distributed version of CHARMM (a program for macromolecular simulations).

There will be a server outage on 2/15/03 between the hours of 08:00 and 12:00 UTC. During this time their isp will be reconfiguring their routers. It's unlikely that the outage will last the full 4 hours.

no new releases in a while, so some people think that the debugging code may be turned off soon. I still estimate that BOINC will release between March and May. Lots of critical bugs still left to be fixed.

Seti@home v2.25 for BOINC has been released today.

This release is for Win32 and includes a fix for the fail 128 problem.

Seti@home v2.26 for BOINC coming soon.

What does BOINC do? Will it let me do more WU's in a day?

Hi ILP!!

xn's our expert on BOINC of course but here are some details:

BOINC

BOINC - distributed computing technology for SETI and beyond

SETI@home consists of many interconnected programs - screensaver, data server, web-page scripts, and so on. This software has served remarkably well, but over time major limitations and flaws in its design have emerged.

To support future projects we are developing the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). Like the original SETI@home, BOINC consists of a client program and a data-distribution server backed by a database. BOINC, however, is not a specific application program - it's a framework that can support many different applications. This will make it easy for us to run multiple computations simultaneously - like AstroPulse and our southern hemisphere search - and to release new versions of these applications without requiring you to manually download and install software.

Even more significantly, BOINC is an open system. Other science projects can create their own distributed computations using BOINC. You choose the projects in which to participate, and you decide how much of your computing resources should go to each project. Your PC might search for ET, study global climate change, and do biological research, all at the same time.

There are many advantages to sharing resources in this way. For example, suppose SETI@home's radio telescope is shut down for repairs and we temporarily run out of data to analyze. With BOINC, your CPU power would be diverted to other projects, under your selection and control.

(Note - more information follows from the SETI URL link above)

The Main BOINC page is here

Happy reading ILP!!

Here's the latest info: They're thinking of removing the Windows debugging code in beta, and doing the debugging in alpha. This will probably occur in the near future, but this isn't written in stone. Windows is experiencing an error return of 11-14% per day.

I for one am not looking foward to this change. I can't get this darn BOINC to work at all...

just create an account, download and install BOINC. you'll get a key thing, it's a long string of numbers and letters. Run BOINC, select Settings, then Attach to Project, then put key in and the project url. it will then download the required files for the project. please note that this is a beta, and there will be some problems. the seti@home app for BOINC crashes like 17% and right now the goal is to get the crashes down to 5% or less in order to release BOINC (and replace the current Seti@home). it'll be a while before they get the crashes down. I'd say close to May.

Here's the latest info on BOINC: The release date isn't set yet. The Windows platform is getting the most attention because it has the most problems. Seti@home v2.25 on BOINC has been getting 11-14% errors on average. Seti@home v2.26 is currently being alpha tested, it will then be released to the beta testers. The goal is to get the error rate less than 1%. Linux appears to be very solid and there's some CS bugs in Unix which are minor. Mac is also doing good. There's some dialup issues to be resolved still.There will be tweaks to test before the final versions are released. Currently, v2.26 appears stable, but this doesn't mean that this will be the final version.BOINC will release when it's completely stable and will produce few errors. Berkeley is also in the process of testing multi-projects.

Update! There's now a setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu... which is the BOINC Alpha project. There's now BOINC v2.26 Alpha for all 3 computer types. Seti@home v2.26 Alpha also is available for download. Keep in mind, these are ALPHA releases, not BETA releases.

Alpha is where they fix all the major bugs, then they add it to Beta, so the beta testers don't get major problems. There will be a new beta release next Wednesday for all platforms (BOINC 2.26). Seti@home v2.26 will also be released and all core clients must be updated to v2.26. Those not updating to the new core client will not be able to download any new work units (Seti@home v2.26). This will ensure that all testers are running the most current client during the test. A final release this month seems possible still.

It seems that the devs have solved many of the problems with no connection present/DUN settings. Here are the new things in BOINC v2.26:

Changes since 2.25:
- When reporting exit codes of the project application to the DB, use

the exit code that was reported from the application instead of the

value from GetLastError()
- ACTIVE_TASK_SET::poll(): set state file dirty flag whenever the set

of active tasks changes (e.g. app exited).
- rename ACTIVE_TASK::abort() to abort_task() (eliminate ambiguity)
- ACTIVE_TASK_SET::check_rsc_limits_exceeded(): check only running

tasks
- CLIENT_STATE::reset_project(): don't delete apps, app_versions if

project is anonymous-platform
- PROJECT::set_min_rpc_time(): don't change min_rpc_time if it's

already later than requested time (from Jens)
- "request_delay" from server overrides exponential backoff
- parse_attr(): don't modify const input string
- XML error in client:
- commented out shutdown()s in http.C.
These seemed to be causing problems.
- Core client: put an element at the top level of ,
not within
- Removed #ifdef around stackwalker dump so it'll dump release builds

as well
- FILE_XFER_SET::insert(): check for error BEFORE inserting in set.
- Removed stackwalkers exception description so duplicate information

is not logged.
- made some stuff const
- added new GUI RPCs (for control)
- added GUI RPCs for Windows
NOTE: pipes don't work on Win. need to change to TCP
- (from Rom) fixes a bug reported by Matze in the forums where after an

explorer crash the BOINC GUI doesn't re-register itself with the new

explorer.
- Fixed a bug where on Windows we were not really waiting for three

seconds before a retry. This is done for both reads and writes since on

Windows there is a notion of exclusive reads which would make

successive read requests fail as well.
- check for "w", "a" in boinc_fopen()
- Retry on all boinc_fopen operations
- added boinc_file_exists()
- Get the complete version string for the Windows OS and include

Service Pack Information if any exist. An example is below:
Microsoft Windows 2003 Standard Server Edition (Build 3790)
- #ifdef out the GUI RPC stuff on Windows for right now, causes a crash

on startup.
- Update version Resouces to version 2.26 for the Windows release.

It seems that BOINC v2.27 and Seti@home v2.27 have been tagged for release. Someone reported that the executable in the download area is not working on Linux, so the release has been halted until until they could get a better handle on this.