Slashdot Mirror
World Community Grid Releases Linux Agent
GrahamHood from WorldCommunityGrid.org writes "The World Community Grid is proud to announce the release of a Linux Agent, for the current Human Proteome Folding Project. Team Slashdot, being the #1 team on the World Community Grid, will be pleased to hear that it is now available for download."
... and the source code?! :)
Jan
Jan
Imagine a beow... no, don't...
It is a great move that a Linux agent has been released. I just wished more companies/projects/institutions would realize that there are people out there that prefer living without having to click on Start to shutdown their box...
Get a free Video iPod!
So, okay, Linux is like 2% of world computer share. BUT lots of the Linux machines are servers. Running 24/7 and with plenty of spare CPU power.
I launch my primary PC, 2GHz CPU. Boot it to Windows. The computation starts and runs for 1h when I check my mail, read some slashdot, then I want to start up Half-Life 2 and have every CPU cycle for myself so I quit the client. I play for 3h, then for the rest of the evening use a text terminal in my bed for IRCing, the main PC is off. 2 billion CPU cycles per day donated.
But I have a PC at work, that works as a Samba server, has 330MHZ CPU, and most of the time does completely nothing. Linux. 8 billion CPU cycles per day donated.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
now what will Team Slashdot be campaigning for?!
The Linux Agent is Valerie Plume.
But you didn't get that from me.
-- A friend of democracy
Logic for beginners:
;-)
;-)
1. World Computing had only a Windows Client until today
2. Team Slashdot is the #1 Team -> lotsa computing power
3. Slashdotians are in general Linux zealots.
Conclusion, The few windows users on slashdot that engage in World Computing have some pretty hefty Windows boxen
That, or you're all closet XP users
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
The fact there is now a linux client is a good things. However, there is a few things that are not very clear. I scan quickly both grid.org and worldcommunitygrid.org.
1) Who can access the results?
2) What are the policies for the input and output?
3) Can any researcher use the results?
4) Is the client close-source?
Thanks
Million Dollar Screenshot
My computer (Windows 2000):
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
There is a EULA, and it looks pretty irritating.
I will leave it to the EULA vultures to pick over this thing -- but it is a doozy.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Agent? Agent!? We don't need no stinking agent.
What kind of agent anyway? Secret agent? Agent Orange? PR agent?
*goes off to read TFA*
Oooooh shiny.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
Seti@Home and other grid computing programs have ports for lots of OSs, I run it on FreeBSD. Why shouldn't they when the program just processes information and sends it back? How much OS specific code is there in grid computing programs like these anyway?
The World Community Grid is proud to announce the release of a Linux Agent
What did they capture him for? Was he spying on them again? Who is this agent, is he a secret agent? What was exchanged in return for his safe release?
Have you metaroderated recently?
I am jackin' it as fast and hard as I can
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Team Slashdot are #1 but only now does it have a Linux client! You're all secretly Windows users! It's all been lies!
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
For anyone asking: No idea what's the license but the source code is open:
http://boinc.ssl.berkeley.edu/source_code.php
(by the way, they really make it hard to get there from the main page...)
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
The only reason the corporate-driven "World Community Grid" has a Linux client is because they ripped it off of the open-source BOINC. Which you guys never promote/publicize for some reason.
I was wondering how this World Community Grid stands up to Folding@Home?
I'm a member of a F@H team and it seems like there are a lot of people participating. Are these efforts competing against one another or are they different areas of study? I don't quite understand.
Also, I know that the F@H client can run in the background and take up no system resources, only unused processor cycles, (which is part of the reason I use it.) Does the World Community Grid project's clients take up a lot of system resources...?
"Lead my skeptic sight."
I would be rather uncomfortable about running a cpu heavy application which requires internet access without some way of auditing its behavior.
I find it more than just uncomfortable. It's ridiculous to ask me for some of my computing power, while in return giving some weird EULA to accept and non-free (as in freedom) application.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
They have to protect their data stream and project data from people who would vandalize it via hacked clients, thus the protected clients.
People on slashdot and the grid have been begging for a linux client since it started. Now they have provided one.
I'm sorry you feel uncomfortable about the eula, but if you think about the reasons behind it and the importance of keeping this data valid, it makes sense.
I personally think that it's a great project and have been happy to contribute 111 days of computing time to the project so far.
And as you tread the halls of sanity, You feel so glad to be, Unable to go beyond. I have a message, From another time..
What's a Linux Agent?
I know Clippy was a Microsoft Agent
It would have been nice to release the source code for the client, eh? Now all of my
idle cpu clocks on all of my dual cpu sun machines will still go to waste heating the
house instead of helping mankind. (the client is AMD or Wintel x86 only).
I suppose the apple guys are in the same camp until 2006 (apple-tel?) also...
When will they ever learn.
Team Slashdot, being the #1 team on the World Community Grid, will be pleased to hear that it is now available for download.
So, just what kind of bandwidth will I need to download Team Slashdot?
...I've searched the FAQ and stuff on the worldcommunity web pages but I can't figure out what I'm supposed to do next after installing it? I'm running it from a command line, no GUI available and can't find any local DOC file on how to install it.
It runs, did a benchmark of the cpus, then sits there.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Wheee - more free R&D resources for pharmacos pimping their drugs to dying people who can't say no to patent-monopoly prices, and the government handouts. When these drug research massively parallel projects can chargeback to my bank account a share of the take proportional to my participation in the project, wake me.
--
make install -not war
Never mind. Found it, underneath the 'self extracting archive' is really a link telling you what to do.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
If they didn't have to support that other, lesser OS that is still polluting everybody's desktops, these folks could use the Secure Computing capability of Linux to wall off the grid client from the rest of the box, right at the kernel level: http://kerneltrap.org/node/4005
Haven't we been taught that in the current climate of Intellectual Property that "public domain" is bad, basically providing no protection against with big-bad-mega-corp coming along with a patent and making it non-free.
Why exactly is it that we have open source "licensing" for software rather than just relying on the public domain? What accountability can we as users in the information. Where is the easy-to-find link where "I" can download the 44 top results for the smallpox treatments?
Sure the projects are run for non-profit organisations, but what guarantee is there on the behaviour of that non-profit in the business it does with for-profit organisations. A license IS NEEDED for the generated discoveries to keep them freely available.
I'd be much happier particpating in a grid if it was already a non-profit organisation itself, which would actually own and hold the intellectual property discovered by the grid, with a constitution to license it to EVERYONE. A reasonable charge could be levied to fund the process of patenting its discoveries to ensure they are kept free-as-in-speech.
The WCG is still a for profit project and any scientific outcome will go to paying customers. Why should I spend my money on it?
I'll better run Folding@Home client as I do see scientific publications rolling out the door and results are open to anyone to use.
http://folding.stanford.edu/
http://folding.stanford.edu/papers.html
http://folding.stanford.edu/FAQ-diseases.html
I had rpms for each service that "builds" from their binary tarball. But the installation is not consistent, and the RPM needs tweaking every time I upgrade.
If your unix sandbox is all its cracked up to be, you *ought* to be able to run the closed source binary client in a sandbox with no worries. I would feed safer, however, if the client was written in Java, and I could run it in a JVM sandbox inside a unix sandbox. That would make it a cross-platform binary to boot. Java actually does pretty well speed wise for long running programs of that nature. I suspect that the lack of built-in complex number support makes the coding rather a pain. Maybe we'll see a Fortran compiler for Java one of these days.
Also, without source code, they're missing out on lots of Linux machines that don't run x86 CPUs, including major G5 clusters, Sparc workstations, Alpha workstations, etc.
Bout time they released this, Pan is a piece of garbage. ;-)
From the looks of things, Easynews beat the slashdot team
in results returned, points generated and run time yesterday.
Come on folks.. re-gain the #1 stop.. or we'll (Easynews) keep
whipping your a$$.
Maybe I'm missing something, since I haven't actually installed it yet (downloading now) but can't you use BOINC? It's open source and multiplatform, runs on Linux x86, PPC, probably other architectures as well, and Mac OS X. Probably there's a windows version...but who cares. ;)
Would that satisfy your requirements?
OT: I wish there was a summary of the various distributed projects along with a rundown of what they do, who's sponsoring them, and what clients you need to help out. I keep hearing about a big IBM-sponsored one that uses a Windows screensaver (it's popular at work) but I can't figure out which project it is.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Well, guess I got ahead of myself there. Just for the record, although World Community Grid (which is clearly the IBM-sponsored project) does use the BOINC client, it only uses the Windows and Linux "official" versions. The OS X and I assume probably also any other roll-your-own-from-source versions don't work. As an example on my Mac I just get this message:
"Mon Nov 7 20:03:27 2005|World Community Grid|Message from server: platform 'powerpc-apple-darwin' not found"
Their loss, I'll find another project to attach to I guess. Too bad, because it's always on and idle most of the day and night, since it basically just acts as my firewall and wireless router.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Does anyone know what the story is with the Debian package of this?
I just spent more than two hours trying to get the "official" version of this running on my headless Debian sarge box, over an SSH session, and I eventually threw in the towel when I couldn't find a script for running it as a daemon that seemed generally accepted to work and be stable. It's too bad, since I have the perfect system for it: my backup server, which sits connected to a cable modem in a friend's basement, on a UPS and 99.9% idle, since all it ever gets used for is the few seconds every day when my other systems rsync to it.
I had high hopes when I found out that there's a packaged version over at https://alioth.debian.org/projects/pkg-boinc/ however that server seems to be dead as an oak door right now.
It's too bad they didn't do a better job documenting this for anything other than a "desktop linux" install with a non-remote user, because I think a lot of the potential users of this software are going to want to do it using a daemon, and install it remotely over SSH -- so it can use the idle cycles on a server or other headless box. Right now it's a real exercise in frustration, sadly, and I think I'll wait until somebody comes up with some good step-by-step instructions on how do it, using precompiled Debian packages.
I'd love to help, but I'm not going to risk possibly screwing up something on my home server for it. There's a reason I swore off installing anything that didn't come from Debian Stable, and maybe I'm just being reminded of why.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yes, for-profits like IBM and United Devices are helping, but the Proteome Folding project is not theirs. Nor do you see an pharmaceutical companies here. The ISB in a non-profit academic center. The lead scientists are top-notch. This data is being published and shared. Check out the papers at http://genomebiology.com/2004/5/8/R52 and http://www.genome.org/cgi/content/abstract/14/11/2 221 for examples. They used the Halobacterium NRC-1 as a practice run and discovered the function of a number of its unknown genes.
(For example, they uncovered over a dozen Htrs--halobacterial transducer proteins--part of the machinery halobacteria uses to sense its environment. These things are amazing extremophiles. They show how life can survive just about anywhere. They're what make the salt ponds at the south end of San Francisco Bay turn purple. NRC-1 came from the Dead Sea.)