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Distributed Computing "Advances"
Quirk writes "NewScientist is reporting on..."Software to be launched in January will let PC users run as many "distributed computing" projects as they like. The program will let PC users search for aliens, help predict climate change and perform advanced biological research - all at the same time."'It is called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). BOINC acts like a software platform that can run a number of screen-saver style applications on top of the PC's own operating system.'"
im already running boinc on a few of the machines at home and work and it works cool. i especially like the built in queing and multi processor support.
Lotas T Smartman www.lotas-smartman.net
Finally, a source for my advanced alien biological climate change program!
Does this mean that now we'll be mapping het the genome of aliens with AIDS?
Goo goo g'joob.
The first project underway in BOINC is to have everybody's machine submit news about BOINC to slashdot, which is so far happening succesfully. This is the first dupe of many.
The first and easily the best known is SETI@home, which since 1999 has enlisted half a million people to analyse data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, looking for signs of alien life.
Better than Seti@home and BOINC: Yeti@home.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Even though you *can* do multiple projects at one time, you have to run seperate applications (if I'm correct) so this would be a good integration into one application that handles multiple projects and allows your machine to be used more efficiently.
Have you ever thought that the internet is just one giant 'distributed computing' effort to find pr0n?
It's easier to wear the spandex than to do the crunches. --David Lee Roth
I was interested in the folding protein project, but are the results open to the public (like the human geneome project) free of charge, or will someone making a buck off *my* computing power?
With all the distributed computing projects out there be sure to read the fine print, if your going to use your computer for a project make sure its helping everyone instead of a few corporations make $.
So the whole work has to be done twice for the sake of correctness. I think they should introduce some trusted user mode, let's say, so that results from users who have invested a certain amount of cpu time should be trusted or at least not every received result double checked. Just every n'th packet or so and if it's invalid they have to recheck all unchecked packets. I guess this would reduce double work a lot as there is normaly only a minority of users who's trying to cheat.
Does this sound sane?
I've always had some mild reservations about running the closed-source SETI code, but convinced myself it wasn't an unreasonable exposure. A meta-app that exists to download yet more closed-source code without telling me... nope, that's over the line. Sorry, lil' green guy, but this is too much to ask.
(signed) a top 1% setiathome client.
My Primer on building a distributed computing project.
(It still needs updating.)
Wouldn't it make more sense if they'd chosen a last word beginning with a K?
Boinking aliens and cancer with my computer? Sign me up!
Build your own website - full service homepage system your m
Using "quotation marks" in the "wrong places" makes everything you "say" seem "suspicious".. Like you're trying to "pull one over" on the "reader" by insinuating theres a double "meaning" to the "word" in "quotes"..
Hate to be a grammar Nazi, but, the the whole quotation mark thing is a pet peeve.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
Yet Another Project Suffering From Unfortunate Acronym Syndrome.
typical reporters fscked their facts in the story.
qoute "The first and easily the best known is SETI@home, which since 1999 has enlisted half a million people to analyse data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, looking for signs of alien life."
I believe distributed.net's client was the first program of its type to download information from a remote server, use idle cpu cycles to calculate whatever, then resubmit it back to the central server. I ran distributed.net back in 98, more then a year before seti came out.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Judge: "What do you have to say about the virus you created, young man?"
Virii writer: "It wasn't a virus, your honor. It was really a non-permission-based propagation model for a distributed computing application that involved producing the results of decreased uptime and further propagation of the non-permission-based distributed application."
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
I didn't see it in the story either. Pardon me please if I'm just blind/illiterate
NUMA is great for dedicated machines, but general purpose machines lending out RAM to other systems? Get real, you'd be better off with a BFO page space.
Remote RAM has to be instantly available and it can't go away. Shitty isn't the word for it when we're talking about using general purpose networking kit like gigabit for NUMA. Utterly unusable and waste of time are the best words to describe it. You need SCI, Myrinet or similar to get shitty performance.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
... because we all know that no really good concept in computing has ever come out of Berkeley. ;)
I'd like to see a distributed computing app that can be used to both do the work (like the current ones do), AND optionally have the ability to submit a task. This way you could have a world wide supercomputer that everybody would have a chance to employ. Very few people would probably use it, but it would be very interesting to see the ways in which different people put it to use.
Scientific progress goes 'BOINC'?
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
This really isn't as good as you might think.
Most distributed computing projects are distributed because they need massive amounts of CPU cycles. Running multiple projects on one machine isn't going to make the projects faster since the same amount of CPU cycles are now being divided up amongst the number of projects that you're running. Infact it'll actually be less because now the machine has to deal with the overhead of switching between project processes.
On the other hand it might make sense if you were running a CPU-intensive project and a data-intensive project at the same time (ie projects that will maximize separate non-conflicting resources on the same machine..)
My Folding@Home Team
Well....the processors in my computers are OWNED by me. I pay the electricity bills to operate them, and YOU want to use my processor time for FREE ?? I dont think so, pony up some cash or keep your distributed clients, thank you.
Oh...that was the sound of a million auxiliary generators being turned on to counter the increased power needs of all these processors.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Search For Terrestrial Intelligence
I know I've been struggling... have you found any? Will this help?
I've been thinking about something like this all semester in my Distributed Computing class.
:)
What I'd really like to see is a system setup where you have a network of clients, any of whom can dispatch an agent across the system that consumes resources to accomplish some goal.
Obviously there would have to be some sort of non-malicious code signing or sandboxing going on within the system, as well as forcing the agents to consume proportional resources (ie the more time/space/bandwidth you give to the sytem, the more you can consume)... either way it's still a neat idea that I'd be eager to participate in...
It'd be a little more exciting that Folding at anyrate..
My Folding@Home Team
I know one of the reasons they created BOINC is that the current SETI@home clientbase is very rigid and can only process data from one telescope -- Aricebo. I also know that the commandline client is tons faster than the screensaver-based client. Is BOINC's flexiblity going to end up making BOINC clients slower than the current dedicated clients?
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I'm sure that spammers will be registering their distributed spam/DDoS zombies real soon. Why sneak the software onto machines when you can get people to sign up for it if you provide fancy ratings and team standings? Throw in some t-shirts and blue pills and they're gold!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Sounds like Windows Update on the automatic setting. :^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Well, in fairness to NUMA it allows a shared memory pool and single system image. These fancy SGI Linux machines with loads of CPUs running a single system image wouldn't exist without NUMA.
NUMA memory may be slower than RAM but it's far faster for interprocessor communications and shared RAM than is a beowulf cluster (which doesn't do shared RAM afaik)
Trolling is a art,
This may be great for a few high profile applications that users are willing to support. But the Globus Toolkit OGSA project has higher ambitions OGSA and arguably a better chance of making a difference in the next generation of the WWW.
From my understanding, Boinc uses OpenGL to unload the screensaver graphics off the main processor's load and onto the graphics card GPU just like how Mac OS X accelerates its GUI graphics (or how Longhorn will do it with DirectX). Too bad Boinc can't uses the GPU like what was covered here on Slashdot under the BrookGPU project yesterday...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
A radio tuned to static is used to feed a stream of random data to a soundcard. The data is used to construct an image, and in the incredibly unlikely event that this image matches a predetermined image, you've proven that the universe is infinite! :-)
Don't forget to check out the url of the "What is SIC@HOME?" page.
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
I thought a long time ago, why not make distributed computing applications as Java Applets hosted on web servers?
Pros:
- Nothing to "install".
- Cross platform (write it once, run it everywhere, right?)
- Easy to use (just browse)
Cons:
- Speed.
- Full featured screen saver not possible?
- uh...speed?
The SETI@home (under boinc) source code is available under the GPL. The AstroPulse code should be available shortly. Yes, now you can see how bad my code really is.
What you won't get with the code is our code signing key (which is under lock and key on an isolated machine) or the ability to distribe your version from our servers, but you are welcome to compile versions for use on your machines and/or distribute your own versions. We won't guarantee to anyone that your version doesn't erase harddrives or distribute child porn, though.
Support SETI@home
This is the BOINC Public License. IANAL, but at first read this looks very far from the GPL or LGPL... Anyone care to provide a better perspective on the legal issue?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.