Diskless BOINC Farms

[Evil-Dragon]

The BOINC website has posted the following story yesterday that might be of real use to those that have computers without hard drives or wish to run boinc without installing boinc to a machine:

March 1, 2007
With BOINCpe you can run a dedicated BOINC machine using a RAM disk, starting from only 256 MB of total RAM. This lets you operate a BOINC farm more energy-efficiently or to use machines without hard disk drives for BOINC.

You can get BOINCpe here: http://blog.schreiter.info/index.php...ecd-for-boinc/

Direct download: http://www.schreiter.info/download/b...eta_v0.4.0.zip

I have not tried this yet but if anyone is willing to give it a try then it might be beneficial to the group.

[mitchellds]

Is anyone using Boinc account manager right now within our team? Does this let you control clients kinda like the Boinc View program, or is the BAM made more for controlling projects?

[drezha]

I used BAM. I liked it. BOINC view was useful for monitoring but BAM worked and did what it was supposed to.

[Bender10]

I got BOINCpe up and running for a test on TANPAKU.

Werks. I did not go through BAM, I just set the Tanpaku HOME profile to do what I wanted.
Using:

GenuineIntel
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.00GHz w/ 512 ram (it's all i had setting around)

WU run times look normal...

[AMDave]

Just a point of caution

Of course, you need a proper license for the Windows version you are running (XP Home is sufficient).

[Bender10]

Ooops. It would help if I added some details.

I kept getting this error from the server:
'not enough disk space(only xx.x MB free for boinc).'
This value changed as I adjusted the disk space used %.

In the Tanpaku "home" profile

I had to change the: Use no more than 50% of total disk space to: 100%


Not sure why. This may have to do with the 128M default memory setting in BOINCpe. I haven't found how (or if) to change that. Needs to be larger. Or at least 200Mb?? 256 maybe??

Or maybe the disk space setting has to be at 100%. I'm having a slow time of it weeding through the setup and config stuff......

[Bender10]

This is a pretty sweet operation.

Just download the BOINCpe_beta_ file.
Unzip.
Put a windows XP install cd in the cd rom.
Put blank cd in burner.
Run PEbuilder.
Boot diskless machine with cd, and poof (oops...poof bad)...I mean ta-da!

If you use a RW CD. You can go back and play with the PEbuild setup files. and burn another one until you get what you want....

[Bender10]

Well, my BOINCpe finished its wu's. It looks like they finished and uploaded with no errors. This looks like a cool alternative....

[jmblazek]

This is good news. Bender10, keep us posted with your progress or any problems you encounter. Also, are you able to test the "PXE/BOOTP network boot" or the "booting from a USB stick/key" options?

This might finally be the best solution to the minimal BOINC cruncher on windows...

1. CPU
2. Motherboard, onboard network
3. RAM
4. PSU

...of course there's K12LTSP but I found that setup a bit overwhelming.

[Bender10]

The BOINCpe may not be the best, but it is real easy. Too bad it's not built on Linux.

I werk on this stuff here and there. The BOINCpe was easy. All the work is done for us. It works right out of the box. Just tweaking if you want.

I'm in the middle of moving to a new house (since xmas). We have been held up by cold weather. Working hard this weekend as the weather is nice.

I've already switched the comp I was using back to normal operations. I'm going to piece together a chassis for the BOINCpe and play with it a bit, when I get a couple of minutes. I'd like to get this to boot from a flash drive.....and finish my new server....play bf2142....move furniture....organize gaming room....shovel driveway....take out trash....work on a NAS....install cabinets in basement....clean windows....get linux box back on-line....