Experiences with BOINC for Android

Let me preface this with, for the most part I am happy with BOINC for android devices, having used on my nexus 7 ( old not the new one released in 2013) for half a year or so now.  Doing this really makes me happy I abandoned my BOINC on raspberry pi quest, as on the nexus with just as powerful if not more so processor as the raspberry pi.  So to explain that last comment a brief discussion on a noticeable technological difference between ARM and the ubiquitous personal computing x86 CPUs.

ARM processors are loved because they use far less energy than x86, not to mention are more cost effective to make.  This though comes at a terrible cost.  From a mathematical perspective, if the integers were the only numbers we have, ARM processors would be the leading processor technology in every device.  This is because ARM processors are just about as good as x86 processors when dealing with integers. The trouble comes from decimals/ floating point numbers. ARM processors are horribly bad in comparison to x86 processors when dealing with those numbers in calculations.

Now I do not claim to be any expert on the calculations done on any BOINC project, but I can not recall the last time I have done any science problem and not had to use decimals.  As such these calculations take longer on ARM processors than x86 even with somewhat comparable speeds quoted.

That being said as someone who loves being able to use his tablet exactly when it is needed, I often have it charging when it is not and use, and fairly often when it is in use as well. So it can work freely doing tasks most of the day/ week / month /year....

For those getting started with BOINC this can greatly propel them forward in points, and make them feel like they are making great progress. But a downside to being a serious cruncher is that my main machine could bring in more cobblestones in a single day than the nexus 7 could do in an entire year of nonstop running.   Not to mention this still touches upon my last post, I am not convinced that there are the projects, and especially the willpower to code, to bring in all these additional devices, with limited individual ability, but massive collective ability.

Boinc on Raspberry Pi Page Updated

The page about Boinc on the Raspberry Pi has been updated. 

The good news Asteroids@ home announced support for the Raspberry Pi, and it appears to attach, and recognize its ability to run as easily as setting it up on any typical PC.


The bad news, it appears I was far to early to the game in getting my Raspberry Pi.  I got my pi before they doubled the memory on the Model B boards.  Which the more and more I look into it and work with it, seems to have been my biggest issue getting any project to run on Pi.  It appears even running close to bare bones, I have far to little available memory to run any project successfully.

So as of now I am diverting my attention elsewhere, and likely swapping or selling the pi to a friend.

Milkyway@home on Raspberry Pi (FAILED)

Tuesday Oct 9th:

Found out yesterday that there are a few other projects that offer files which you yourself can compile to customize it for your own system.  These even work on ARM processors ( the big hurdle towards crunching boinc projects on the Raspberry Pi). One of which is Milky way @ home, so I got to work on it last night, only to realize somehow the whole boinc client and manager pair was FUBAR.  After trouble shooting, googling, and searching even more, I realized that the authorization configuration file was to blame.

Through trying to get things to work, somehow I wound up with copies of the authorization file all over the place on my Pi.  And the one everyone said was important oddly seemed to be blank.  ( Hard to have a password in a file, when there is nothing in the file!)  So I did a complete wipe of everything boinc related on my Pi, then reinstalled the client and manager.   This time it was able to connect to the client host, so success on that front.

Then I attached to Milkyway@home, and got the usual message that my arm-linux-unknown type CPU was not supported.  I was not shocked, I had this next trick up my sleeve.

sudo apt-get install boinc-app-milkyway

Running that in the terminal and installing the source code for the milkyway project. I went back to the GUI manager, and clicked update on Milkyway@home.  Going to the event log one of my best friends when trouble shooting BOINC, I see a red message and my heart sinks.  But I read the message, and got very excited all of sudden, it was not about an unknown and unsupported processor.  It was that I had a lack of disk space to download a task for the project.  Changed settings, and I still was slightly short, so I cleared out a few Raspberry Pi programs I have no intent in using for awhile, the big one that cleared quite a bit of space was "Scratch" sorry MIT but if I am going to code I am going to relearn a far more substantial programming language such as C++, Java, or Python.

Hit the update button again, hopped over to the event log and saw this glorious message :  "got 1 new tasks."  While it gives an ETA of 36 hours or so, not shocking due to the hardware on the Raspberry Pi.
  
The Bad:

Things seemed good I watched it crunch for 10-20 minutes with no issues.  Switched off the screen and went to work on other items.  Checked back a few hours later, and it said that it had only crunched for "1 hour"  thinking that's not right, I checked if the raspberry pi was going to sleep or some other sort of standby, found no such sign.  But in the event log there was a troubling set of notices.  It seemed for nearly 10 minutes, every 30 seconds or so the task would get reset.  Then after that 10 minutes the task would abort as failed.

While I can not know this for certain, it is my belief that why the project curnches fine for roughly 1 hour and 40 minutes, is I believe that is when the project reaches its first check point.  When it hits that check point, it runs into a bunch of errors, and freaks out so to speak.

So while I had a lot of hope, they were dashed as while I can get projects and have them start crunching with Milkyway @ home, I have not been able to get one to complete.  ( I ran it for a half a day, and each task it got ran into the same issues).

Boinc On Raspberry Pi Page Updated.

The page located in the top bar of my blog, focusing on Boinc  on the Raspberry Pi has been updated.

The Big news is I have learned that Radioactive@home is now supported on the Raspberry Pi.  Sadly this makes the only two projects which seem to be supported with little to no effort on the Raspberry pi reliant on extra pieces of hardware.   Radioactive at home requires radiation detecting hardware, while Quake Catchers network requires a seismometer to measure possible earthquakes in your area.

While its a bit sad that I can not completely put my Raspberry Pi to use yet, it is a cause for hope as it is viewed as acceptable for another project, so hopefully more are in development.

Tech Can Make it Too Easy!

While I am one of the millions who own an iPhone, I am not an apple fan boy by any stretch of the imagination, in fact I lean more towards the apple hater side of the equation than the apple fan boy, though I wouldn't call myself either.  But now having every single machine I have running Linux apple iTunes is basically out of the question now, not that I bought much from them anyway.

I will say though, I am a huge fan of google, and are far more fond of their google play offering, as its linked to your google account, and basically accessible from any computer with an internet connection.  But the problem was Flash is not supported on the Raspberry Pi, so I couldn't turn that into a google play enabled device to make my TV "smart" and my tower which I use my TV as a monitor did not output sound along the HDMI Cable,  I always figured it was a problem with compatibility with my video card.

When suddenly I spotted the UG802 android enabled device designed to turn any TV into a smart TV.  I almost gave in, but as the special I found ran for 13 ( now 11 more days as of the writing and posting of this), I decided to spend some time trying to trouble shoot my current issues.  Sadly the Raspberry pi, while incredibly fun to play with, I still think its too new of a technology for its use and there is very little support out there for it to function anywhere close to normal as a standard computer device, or even operate at the same level as a tablet.

But I realized sound should be transmittable over HDMI even through a video card so I went to trouble shoot that.  I went through a few steps making sure the card was recognized as an actual device on my computer, which it was.  I then went into the sound settings on my computer and unmuted every single channel.  But sound still would not play, but I about ready to give up clicked on the speaker symbol for the ubuntu operating system and under volume controls it said "Sound Settings... "  about ready to give up, I clicked on it.  Then low and behold right there, it gave the option to switch output device to my HDMI out through my video card, and almost as if it belonged in the bible "and there was sound, and it was good."

Sadly this was likely all I had to do for the whole 2 months I had been trying to think of ways to allow me to watch Google Play movies on my TV.  But I will admit I was outsmarted by something so incredibly simple.

Raspberry Pi Update

 

Good News.... As you can see is it is here. And is pictured below in the raw.



The good news, there is a wealth of easy to follow information out their on getting it set up, and as they have been out for awhile most major issues have help forum posts describing how to solve them (more on my main issue later).  To get the full feldged Raspberry pi experience, and deciding to finally test out the SD card slot on my laptop which I have honestly never used prior to a few days ago ( when the first package arrived, while I was waiting for my back ordered raspberry pi).  I self imaged the SD card, which with a simple google you can find a plethora of sites explaining how to do that on basically any operating system.


It powered up and booted no problem, slightly odd at first but you need to type an actual command to start the GUI interface.  The biggest shock is you know you are dealing with a lower level system when you need to learn the command "sudo shutdown -a now" which is what I needed to type to shut it down.

The Weird...

Possibly the weirdest issue I had while I was getting stuff up and running on the Raspberry pi, came when I went to type the simple character @.  As the Raspberry Pi is released from a UK company with limited software and abilities due to its small form factor, it was automatically programmed to be accepting UK style keyboards, which apparently has the " mark as the shift character for the number 2 instead of the @ us US members are used to.   For anyone that has problems typing an @ character with a raspberry pi, the following link is quite helpful in enabling you to remap the settings on the keyboard, to the keyboard you actually have.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=6907

The bad...

My hopes to get this easily up and running on boinc has hit a road block. I will need to do a lot more googling and reading before I manage to get things working.  Even then it might literally be I need to wait things out for a bit until the few projects that have expressed an actual interest in getting their projects to support raspberry pi actually do.  So for those of you that are following along Correlizer is a no go, even though they say they have an embedded application for ARM processors, when I attached to their project, I got an error message that the type of processor was unsupported.

BOINC on Raspberry Pi

Oh my, oh my, I am gonna try! Alright that's enough of the rhyming. So intrigued by technology, and fun ways to play around with items, and while not using them letting them crunch BOINC projects. I am going to experiment with crunching boinc projects on a Raspberry Pi. There will be a dedicated page at the top of the blog used to catalogue my effort, which will likely be coupled with many dedicated blog posts.

 Currently the page consists of some concerns and the discussions about the projects that would be able to run on the Raspberry Pi.  It will also be continuously updated as I find more resources and information pertaining to this endeavour. Again this is mostly something to tickle my fancy, as the processor is not all that powerful, and the GPU is not OpenGL enabled.

Though if I am having fun, and I can get these things successfully working, I may decide to really have some fun and try and set up a Bramble ( a raspberry pi cluster). Though that will completely test my technological abilities, and eat a lot of almost non-existent free time.