Network computing using Boinc
Years ago I installed the Seti@home screensaver. For some reason I abandoned it then, but recently I came across the Boinc client which is used to power several network computing projects and it resparked my intrest in network computing.
I came accross the Boinc client in an artical in De Volkskrant about the Einstein@home project. Boinc is a program which is used for distributed computing. When installed it uses all the spare computing resources of your CPU to do complex calculations. The combined computing power from all boinc clients out performs any super computer on the planet which makes ideal to do very complex simulations of all sorts. Einstein@home uses all this power to try to find gravity waves. Information is collected from two observatories (one in the US the other in germany) and analyzed using the boinc software.
What I especially like about this software is the possibility to join different projects and contribute to scientific research (which is a bit lacking from the seti project).
What I truely hate about the Boinc manager is it impossible user interface. It’s so incredibly bad I can’t even begin to describe all the flaws it currently has (a lot of people agree on this. You should see some of the heated debates in the seti@home forums). One of the main problems is configuration of the software. This all has to be done from any of the projects homepages. I joined four different ones if i want to change something in any of them. I need to go to the projects website update settings there. Return to the boinc manager. Tell it to retrieve the new settings and hope they get picked up correctly. It took me an hour(!) to set up the seti@home screensaver the way I wanted it, going back and forth between the website and the manager.
Then there’s all the information in the different screens which is pretty hard to decipher. There’s no decent official user manual and the information there is is sometimes.. we’ll you decide:
A BOINC project gives you credit for the computations your computers perform for it. BOINC’s unit of credit, the Cobblestone 1, is 1/100 day of CPU time on a reference computer that does:
1,000 double-precision MIPS based on the Whetstone benchmark.
1,000 VAX MIPS based on the Dhrystone benchmark.
These benchmarks are imperfect predictors of application performance, but they’re good enough.
The first line starts out OK but if your a non techie it’s impossible to comprehend what there on about in the following lines. It get’s even worse when they start giving code samples of how credit is calculated. Come on guys, get a grip. I only wanted to know what ‘Avg. credit’ meant I don’t want to know all this.
Unfortunately the complexities of the user interface makes it very hard for a none techie or newbie to get it to work which seriously harms the potential for this project.