LHC@home

I've been thinking (I know, bad news right...), Would it be possible to set up BOINC on Public Computers such as universities or other schools? Let's say for the moment that I was given permission from my university to do this, would I be breaking any rules? I highly doubt they would allow it in the first place but they have hundreds of state-of-the-art computers...

It would be a great opportunity if you ask me. What do you think?

Tim

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It seems to me you've answered your own question:

>>I highly doubt they would allow it in the first place

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Gaspode the UnDressed
http://www.littlevale.co.uk

<blockquote> Would it be possible to set up BOINC on Public Computers such as universities or other schools?

It would be a great opportunity if you ask me. What do you think?

Tim</blockquote>


Your idea sounds very good!! As a taxpayer supporting public universitys I would been very unhappy if a huge resource like computer processors just sat thier idling when they could be used for real productive purpose.

Check out this link, it addresses your question and may give you more clout with your school.

http://uwnews.org/uweekarticle.asp?articleID=12744

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A friend of mine used to work as sysadmin at the institute of medicine at the university of Copenhagen. He installed seti@home classic on all the machines there.(it was before the days of BOINC) So it is possible that they will allow it.

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Chrulle
Research Assistant &amp; Ex-LHC@home developer
Niels Bohr Institute

<blockquote>Let's say for the moment that I was given permission from my university to do this, would I be breaking any rules? I highly doubt they would allow it in the first place but they have hundreds of state-of-the-art computers...</blockquote>

If your intention is to ask first, then by all means, ask! Not doing so and installing it anyway leads to some tricky legal problems, but the worst they can do at this point is say no.

Though, judging from Chrulle's experience, I'd search the machines for the program first. If some ambitions system administrator has gotten there first, just change it to your I.D. and threaten to blow the whistle on him if you're not cut in for a certain number of systems. ;)

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All of the computers (a couple hundred at a minimum) in the main commons area are set up to delete any program that was installed wihtout consent. This happens whenever the computer is restarted. I would have to go through the correct channels then in order for this to work. There is a distibuted computing class (well more like a section of a class) that a professor teaches, I'm going to bring up my plan with him in the next couple of weeks once I work out the particulars.

Thanks all for the advice, anything else let me know.

Tim

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Check out my blog Singularity Now

The University of Washington has BOINC running on hundreads of computers. There Housing and Food services along has 257 computers running it. There IT Dept. has about 8,500 systems running it also.

Of course most of that time goes into the Rosetta@home project that is run there but some to other projects.

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Pizza@Home - Rays Place - Rays place Forums

I think that the main concern for public schools and uni's is bandwidth.

At SCU in Australia there are approx 10,000 computers. If all of them were running BOINC then this would equate to a large chunk of net traffic and bandwidth. Could get expensive.

Secondly, each staff member and student has their own profile and as such when they logoff their profile is then reset to a default thus problems for BOINC.

Could be interesting though if Uni's got behind these projects.

Cheers
Peter

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I've tried here at the University of Hull, UK.

Several problems:

Security - The uni will only have programs that if they access the internet they need appropriate security certificates.
Bandwidth - Lots of computers x lots of crunching = slow network. (funnily enough that didnt stop several students d/l 10gb/day on the uni network)
Cost - Having 3000+ computers on full tilt 12hrs a day is more power consuming than 3000+ idle ones. Universities are strapped for cash as it is.

This is coming from a student - I have to apply to the uni for them to sell me their old computers for my BOINC farm. I'm glad that electricity is included in my rent costs!

BOINC@Hull - the BOINC project/farm I run

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BOINC@Hull . xfire . mySpace

I my University (FEUP), they had plans to implement Grid Computing throughout the whole campus during 2005. But I haven't seen anything through the whole year, maybe they had problems of some sort. Maybe sometime I will go down there I ask the informatic services why wasn't it implemented, I just know there are about 600 P4 2,8 gHz and another 600 PIII 1 ghZ almost 24/7 turned on and most of the time they're idle. That's a waste of crunching power.

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I've recently found a very interesting about using BOINC in public services: one of the users of BOINC, the only portuguese listed in the Top 100 multi-project BOINC participants is called 'esenviseu', the name intrigued me because 'viseu' is the name of a city in the interior of Portugal, so I went to google and found out that they are a high school! Good to hear that at least a public service here in Portugal is taking advantage of a lost of idle computer time.

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I've recently found a very interesting about using BOINC in public services: one of the users of BOINC, the only portuguese listed in the Top 100 multi-project BOINC participants is called 'esenviseu'

and maybe you have noticed that LHC's highest single contributor is ksba, Die Kantonsschule Baden. See their profile

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I'm a university student in Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

Computers are available in all classrooms (mainly P4 2.0 ones) and almost every dormitory room has a computer set.

There are approximately 1000 computers in the campus.

But I am quite sure that I am the only one crunching distributed computing projects.

What a waste but what I can do is so limited. Your projects actually only utilize computers from developped countries, it's a pity.

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I don't think there is any restriction on what countries can participate in project. Sometimes language is a barrier but even so I was able to attach to SZDG without being able to understand a word on the webpage (it is translated now). It is more the network administators do not know about DC, or are unwilling to risk the possible problems involved in installing and supporting it. I would bet that if a project originated at your university you would find most of the campus computers running it.

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BOINC WIKI

BOINCing since 2002/12/8

I don't think there is any restriction on what countries can participate in project. Sometimes language is a barrier but even so I was able to attach to SZDG without being able to understand a word on the webpage (it is translated now). It is more the network administators do not know about DC, or are unwilling to risk the possible problems involved in installing and supporting it. I would bet that if a project originated at your university you would find most of the campus computers running it.

That's right. There is even not a single Chinese project, let alone my university :p

Anyway, the country rank inspire us chinese people to crunch crunch crunch..

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I would bet that if a project originated at your university you would find most of the campus computers running it.

And how!

On Rosetta one of the top ten participants is Housing and food Services with over 3 million credits. Who are Housing and Food services? They are the on-campus organisation that houses and feeds the students and Rosetta's own university. Now there is a surprise!

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