Hi guys,

Although my account information may show that I am completely new to BOINC since Monday 22nd February 2016 (today), I am actually not completely new to BOINC.

From round about 1998 to 2002 or so, while I was at university and using a 1 GHz uniprocessor Pentium I at the time (I am now using a 2.60 GHz Intel Core i7 with 17.3" 1920 x 1080 screen and nVidia GeForce GTX-980M and I do not currently have any BOINC project plus the Folding @ Home project clients installed and set up on the laptop), I participated in both the SETI @ Home and
Folding @ Home distributed computing projects, using an old account which I no longer have the login details to so it probablly will be now dormant (probably since 2002) and so I have had to set up a new account this morning using my current email. I have no idea how many work units I completed for both projects through the old account.

Now that we have the very affordable Raspberry Pi with us (the mere suggestion of a credit card-sized computer for $35 like the Raspberry Pi / Banana Pi / Arduino and such like would have no doubt been laughed off back in 1998 - 2002 as such technology didn't exist back then), I am considering setting up a SETI / BOINC cluster using 8 - 32 (or 64) Pis running SETI @ Home on processor 1 of each Pi, Folding @ Home on processor 2 of each Pi (each Pi being quad-core, overclocked to 1 GHz) and two other projects (which I will choose out of the several projects currently running at the moment) on processors 3/4 on each Pi.

I already know that there is no way of assigning each project to a specific processor on each Pi, but it sure would be nice if there was some way of accomplishing such a thing and some of the other projects apart from SETI and Folding sound interesting.

There is already 64-bit native Linux version of the Folding @ Home software.

My question(s) is(are) this(these) :-

Although the latest version (v. 7.6.22) of the BOINC client is available for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows from XP to 10 and 64-bit Intel-based Mac OS X, the 32-bit / 64-bit Linux version of the BOINC client have not been updated since Friday 28th February 2014 (v. 7.2.42).

#1. Has anyone ever tried running v. 7.6.22 of the BOINC Windows client under Raspbian on the Raspberry Pi with WINE / PlayOnLinux?

#2. Has anyone ever set up a SETI / BOINC cluster consisting of several Pis?

I have already seen vids on YT showing how some people have managed to turn several Pis into a multi-core cluster computer / supercomputer. I don't think I want to go down that path because the steps are very complicated and convoluted because you have to set up MPI (Message Passing Interface) on each Pi (with a good risk that you might forget to set up MPI on one or two Pis), you would need to type several commands at the command prompt (I am very familar with MS-DOS commands but not Linux commands), the current implementation of MPI requires that you set up each Pi as 'Pi01', 'Pi02', 'Pi03' and so on from what I have seen in the vids, and I just want to be able to be free to set up each Pi as 'seti-1' (or 'boinc-1'), 'seti-2' ('boinc-2'), 'seti-3' ('boinc-3') and so on right up to 'seti-32' ('boinc-32') or 'seti-64' ('boinc-64').


CoolHipDude 8-)

I have four Pi2's. They call them a Bramble when you have more than one.

I'm running Raspbian on them but on the Stretch release so I can live on the bleeding edge and get BOINC 7.6.25. If you stick with the Jessie release the latest BOINC in the repo is 7.4.23. You don't need wine and probably wouldn't have much memory left for apps if go down that path.

As for projects we're currently testing a Seti multi-beam v8 app. Einstein also have a app (supposedly in Beta but its been around for a while) to process smaller BRP4 work units. Asteroids also had an app but they increased the size of their work units a few times (before the Pi2 even came along) such that the B and B+ couldn't complete them in time. They haven't recompiled their app to take advantage of the ARMv7 features. I am not sure about other projects.

Seti tasks are taking on average 27 hours a work unit. Einstein BRP4 are around 15 hours a work unit. So they are quite slow compared to an Intel. The Pi2 doesn't overclock very well and you'll need a heatsink for the SoC.

Neither BOINC nor the project apps use MPI, so you'd need to code that bit yourself. Most of us just run each Pi as a separate device. You can ssh into each one if you need to do maintenance and BOINCtasks running on a PC will happily talk to them as well, that way we can run them headless.

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MarkJ