Has anyone managed to get Charity Engine running on a raspberry pi?
I installed BOINC on raspbian, switched on charity engine as account manager and all the projects were listed in the account manager but everything has stalled and I get the message "waiting to contact project servers" in the main window.
I have updated each project using the project command window and get the amount of work already done displayed. But still nothing happens and no work is fetched.
It is great to see such excitement around getting Charity Engine on other platforms. We currently do not have any projects that support ARM architecture at this time only x86 architecture.
We are exploring ARM support for future applications. Applications that run on Android devices would likely be the first major ARM support, but that is coming down the road... It would not that hard to port to support other ARM devices at that time.
Funny you should mention the brilliant Raspberry Pi, we plan to give some away as prizes later this year. We share the same mission in many ways; the 'whole world computing', etc. (Same reason we love things like www.codecadamy.com.)
BOINC on Raspi - and on ARM generally - has a lot of interest. Apart from anything else, the most energy-efficient unused computing on Earth belongs to a billion 1GHz+ smartphone CPUs doing nothing at night except charge a battery, together wasting over 200 exaFLOPS... It's mind-boggling.
Sorry, we missed this post! Right now; nothing really suitable for a Raspi, but we do have a distributed web-monitoriong app coming online soon which should work fine. (It uses very little CPU.)
Still on the to-do list. Although a great success and rightly so, Raspis are still only a very small percentage of the world's computers and also fall below the minimum spec for most of our customer-requested applications. We literally cannot use them yet - at least, not properly.
After we develop our own custom web scraping and monitoring apps though (both trivially easy for any machine to do), that will change.
Volunteer computing can, and should, harness the surplus resources of every computer on the planet, so we will certainly get to the Raspis!
Yes, this is done. We have various low-cpu tasks under the umbrella of a generic 'ce' label, can be easily performed by a Raspi. Turns out that connections are just as useful as CPUs.
Well .. it was a good theory. I did the installation on an Raspi B+ a couple of days ago, and it seems to know about the Rosetta project that's running on my x86_64 machines, but it hasn't actually done any work :(
The low-cpu tasks under the generic 'ce' label which Mark mentioned earlier are Windows-only (at the moment). Devices that can't run that should get other tasks, though -- looks like in your case Rosetta. Will look into why you're not getting work (*Could be on our end, could be at Rosetta's end).
What OS are you running, and how much RAM and spare disk on the device?
Rosetta may be requiring 1GB RAM -- though I think in actuality it uses < 400MB. Will look into this, though it'll take till some time next week.
(*It's possible your box is falling into a bit of a crack, applications-wise: we don't have a lot of Linux devices which also have less than 1GB RAM. But please stay tuned...)
Has anyone managed to get Charity Engine running on a raspberry pi?
I installed BOINC on raspbian, switched on charity engine as account manager and all the projects were listed in the account manager but everything has stalled and I get the message "waiting to contact project servers" in the main window.
I have updated each project using the project command window and get the amount of work already done displayed. But still nothing happens and no work is fetched.
Any advice or hints would be appreciated.
It is great to see such excitement around getting Charity Engine on other platforms. We currently do not have any projects that support ARM architecture at this time only x86 architecture.
We are exploring ARM support for future applications. Applications that run on Android devices would likely be the first major ARM support, but that is coming down the road... It would not that hard to port to support other ARM devices at that time.
There is some interesting work going on to support x86 on ARM such as discussed in this article http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4397620/Russian-software-runs-x86-code-on-ARM though their 2014 delivery for great performance is still a while off.
We are glad to have your support and enthusiasm for Charity Engine! I hope this answers your questions.
What a shame, having got boinc running I might point it at something else until you have ARM support on your projects.
Thanks.
Funny you should mention the brilliant Raspberry Pi, we plan to give some away as prizes later this year. We share the same mission in many ways; the 'whole world computing', etc. (Same reason we love things like www.codecadamy.com.)
BOINC on Raspi - and on ARM generally - has a lot of interest. Apart from anything else, the most energy-efficient unused computing on Earth belongs to a billion 1GHz+ smartphone CPUs doing nothing at night except charge a battery, together wasting over 200 exaFLOPS... It's mind-boggling.
You might find this chap's blog useful too: http://burdeview.blogspot.com.au/p/raspberry-pi-boinc-project-ive-created.html
Cheers,
Mark
So, do we have any projects that CE can run on a Raspberry-Pi now?
I guess that's a "No!" ??
Hi Graham,
Sorry, we missed this post! Right now; nothing really suitable for a Raspi, but we do have a distributed web-monitoriong app coming online soon which should work fine. (It uses very little CPU.)
Cheers,
Mark
Thanks Mark, keep me posted! :)
Any progress with this yet?
Hi Graham,
Still on the to-do list. Although a great success and rightly so, Raspis are still only a very small percentage of the world's computers and also fall below the minimum spec for most of our customer-requested applications. We literally cannot use them yet - at least, not properly.
After we develop our own custom web scraping and monitoring apps though (both trivially easy for any machine to do), that will change.
Volunteer computing can, and should, harness the surplus resources of every computer on the planet, so we will certainly get to the Raspis!
Cheers,
Mark
How's this going?
Hi David,
Yes, this is done. We have various low-cpu tasks under the umbrella of a generic 'ce' label, can be easily performed by a Raspi. Turns out that connections are just as useful as CPUs.
Cheers,
Mark
So .. we just install CE on a Pi, and it should automatically grab some appropriate projects?
Well .. it was a good theory. I did the installation on an Raspi B+ a couple of days ago, and it seems to know about the Rosetta project that's running on my x86_64 machines, but it hasn't actually done any work :(
Hey Mark .. are you receiving? How do I make my Raspi B+ grab some work that it can actually do?
Hi Graham,
Still looking into it! Confess this isn't something we have actually tried ourselves yet. Please stand by for an update... :)
Cheers,
Mark
The low-cpu tasks under the generic 'ce' label which Mark mentioned earlier are Windows-only (at the moment). Devices that can't run that should get other tasks, though -- looks like in your case Rosetta. Will look into why you're not getting work (*Could be on our end, could be at Rosetta's end).
What OS are you running, and how much RAM and spare disk on the device?
It's the original 8GB "NOOBS" Raspbian edition with 512MB memory thus:
So I guess it shouldn't be trying to do Rosetta tasks! But it would be nice if it could do something useful ..
Rosetta may be requiring 1GB RAM -- though I think in actuality it uses < 400MB. Will look into this, though it'll take till some time next week.
(*It's possible your box is falling into a bit of a crack, applications-wise: we don't have a lot of Linux devices which also have less than 1GB RAM. But please stay tuned...)
Any tasks for arm devices incoming soon?
Hi Marius. As you can tell, we don't officially support Ras Pi. But this should work: