Hi everyone,

Quick question on computing inside a Virtualbox guest.. I work for a corporation and have received permission from managment to use a small group of PCs (refreshed PCs waiting to be returned to vendor at end of the year) for number crunching. I tried installing BOINC directly on these machines, however I'm unable to download any projects. Some quick and dirty investigation leads me to believe they are blocking the connection with their firewall. Strange, but unfortunately how it is at a big company.

What I was thinking is that I could create many Virtual Box guests at home, set these Guests up for BOINC and download tasks, then put these guests on the work PCs. These guests could crunch their numbers, then when the tasks are complete, I would bring them home and fire up the guests on my home PC and allow them to upload the tasks and get new work.

I looked into BOINC Portable, but decided against this. The forum posts I read suggested that results would be invalidated if a different PC or processor uploaded the results than computed them. Are there any sort of issues with Virtualbox guests computing/uploading on different architecture? I know that Virtualbox shows some of the host processor to the guest, I just don't know how much. I know many of these PCs have Core 2 Duos and the laptop I would be uploading the results from has a Core i5.

Any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Isn't it easier to ask for permission through their firewall, since you already have permission to run BOINC and one or more projects on those computers?

The walking to and fro with computer images/virtual box images can go wrong and will be extremely tedious.

In any case, the computer that downloads the tasks gets registered with a hostID. This hostID should also upload & report those tasks again. The CPU doesn't matter that much, just rerun the benchmarks when installed on the computer doing the calculations.

No, normally the thing to keep an eye on is the operating system. That you don't use Linux to try to run tasks downloaded on a Windows computer and v.v. But in the case of the VM that doesn't matter as the VM states which OS you run. And I assume here that you use a form of Linux, as I doubt you're going to pay for all the licenses for all the Windows VMs you wanted to install... ;-)

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Hi Ageless,

Yes, asking for them to open ports is easier.. unfortunately, it's not the asking that is tough, but the actual "getting it done" that is difficult ;)

When we get a new application that requires firewall changes, we have a demand and change management process that takes up to a month to get these changes approved. We would have to go in front of this committee and get approval for this firewall change from the very-high ups. The managers that approved my request do not believe they can get the networking analysts on board, and I agree: they are typically very difficult to work with.

I have begun with the computation on the computers. Your information regarding VMs was very helpful, it sounds like I shouldn't have any issues. For ease of deployment, I used Ubuntu 12.04 x64. I now have a total of 16 cores running BOINC on my Ubuntu VMs, and may be able to add 4 more to the mix. You are absolutely right, transferring the VM files back and forth is a headache, but aside from taking a long time and having to verify that everything made the journey okay, it's not too bad.

If I encounter any issues, I will let everyone know. The one VM will be out of work in less than 24 hours, so I should be able to give an update tomorrow.

So far no issues. It's a bit cumbersome having to zip, test, move, unzip, upload tasks/get new tasks, zip, move, unzip, start the machines again, but this has allowed me to add 16 cores to my computing arsenal. Hopefully I will be able to get some more in the future.