GIMPS for BOINC?

[FeLiNe]

I don't have a lot of time for DC (or anything else, really) these days, but I noticed accidentily that Berkeley's BOINC stuff seems to be in a workable test-phase now. For those who didn't follow the stuff one or two years ago, in a nutshell BOINC is a DC infrastructure into which different DC projects can embed their own DC clients and that alllows for scheduling different clients, splitting work between different projects, maybe even keeping track of "total output" across various projects.

So far the only client that uses BOINC is the new version of the seti@home client and I'm wondering if there's hay to be made by getting a GIMPS BOINC client out of the door fast -- this way many seti folks would get to see for the first time in their life that there's other DC projects out there beyond s@h, gimps could profit from any server-outages seti experiences and in particular could benefit from people's cycles whenever there's more seti users than there is work available.

From the current setiboinc-page:

Each work unit is now processed a limited number of times (typically three). When we have no work for your computer, you'll get a 'no work available' message. We encourage you to participate in other BOINC-based projects; then, when SETI@home has no work, your computer can stay busy doing other scientific research.

Given that they are currently re-re-re-re-running the same old WU for the tenth time (or whatever the current overcrunch might be) this appears like a nice way to piggyback onto a DC project that got way too big for its own good...

Anybody know of any kind of plans for this?

[Jeff Gilchrist]

Although BOINC is in "beta" it seems many people are having lots of problems with the client, especially on SMP machines.

There is another project that is using it as well: http://predictor.scripps.edu/

Since GIMPS already has client/server software that seems to work quite well, it would probably be a lot of work to support both it and BOINC as well as trying to handle the task of showing stats from the BOINC people along with primenet.

Does the BOINC client automatically "see" other BOINC projects or does the user have to "add" them themselves?

Jeff.

[PrimeCruncher]

The BOINC option was discussed a while back. George explained that it wasn't really beneficial because most of the code in the current PrimeNet server is stuff that is Mersenne-prime-hunting specific.

[BotXXX]

There are many platform and/or framworks that are available for running different projects. The problem is that current projects are to heavily designed on their own code and so on. Switching them to a general platform is as almost as starting from scratch with code developing again. Altho the client server communication doesn't have to be made again because this is provided by the framework/platform.

That BOINC is so much in the news and is widely know is because of the connection with Seti@home which involes many people. Other platforms exsist and have each their plusses and minusses.

I would not encourage GIMPS to switch to the BOINC platform.

[ColdFury]

I don't want GIMPS being affiliated with the seti@home people at all. They'd have us rerunning each exponent 15 times.