Boinc

[sur|seth]

will the folding project participate in berkeleys open infrastructure for network computing as soon as its established?

[wirthi]

That question has been asked before, though there was no clear answer from Howard:

http://bane.free-dc.org/forum/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=1660

[runestar]

Originally posted by wirthi
That question has been asked before, though there was no clear answer from Howard:

http://bane.free-dc.org/forum/showthread.php3?s=&threadid=1660

Well, the problem is that there is NO BOINC yet.. its kind of hard to say if you are going to use something if there's nothing there to see if you can use it. ;)

Considering all of SETI's current problems, I would think Howard would be very careful to test it out first before he committed himself to using it.

Best,

RuneStar½

[FoBoT]

why?
its working quite nicely the way its setup at the moment

no need to muck up everything with "fancy stuff"

if it ain't broke, don't fix it

[runestar]

yes, but there's also something called preventive maintenance. =) at least until we get the nanobots to take over that. ;)

RS½

[sur|seth]

the SEIT@home project had money problems and will be closed down, because the search for ET isnt said to be a "serious scientific project", but it is a completely different thing with the BOINC-project. Quoting zdnet:
"According to Anderson The Planetary Society and the state of California are the project's main sponsors. The project had also recently won a $900,000 grant that would support components of the SETI@home project. The grant was awarded to develop the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), which is expected to support a number of distributed computing projects."
so i think the financial future of BOINC is saved. plus i think that every distributed computing project could profit from a general interface to which millions of people will be able to contribute their computing time. it is a great chance for smaler project to gain significant popularity.

[FoBoT]

unless the "general interface" is bloated/gui only
DC clients should be behind the scenes, service installs rule!

[runestar]

The SETI@home project isn't closing down just because of the money. The project was NOT designed to run this long originally, but because of the tremendous response, they extended the running of it.

As for the type of interface, I think its wrong to say it shouldn't be GUI. Remember, that was the thing that caught the interest of so many people in SETI, and I personally still enjoy have a nice interface, although preferably with a minimum impact to the running.

However on that note, for the power users, there should be an option for a minimal or no-frills client. As for a service option, that's more for the power users. Remember above all else you want something that is EASY to install for your average user... and trying to explain a service to your average user can be more resource-consuming than it is useful. ;)


It still will be interesting to see just how portable BOINC will be. There have been mentions of projects interested in it, but no names. I suspect they are taking the wait and see approach... they will withhold decision until there something they can actually try out and evaluate.

I hope they get a stable, secure, and yet flexible system for BOINC... it could potentially be a huge boom for D.C. projects... but the one thing I wonder is how will they make sure projects that use get an equal footing... on one hand, they DID develop it and there is some bias for their own projects, but on the other hand, it is suppose to be in the spirit of open-source also.

TTFN,

RuneStar½