Hi

Rosetta@home has recently started testing some Virtualbox based tasks, building on the massive success of Deepmind's Alphafold AI + Rosetta approach at this year's CASP competition.

There's a tweet here requesting more users install Virtualbox so they can do more testing: https://twitter.com/RosettaAtHome/status/1403057126541447170

So I'm happy to install Virtualbox on most of my machines as I get to them. I have the following questions though:

1. Is there a way to see if BOINC detects Virtualbox correctly - either locally, or preferably remotely? It seems this needs incorporating into the "My computers" page.

2. Is it correct that for BOINC to use Virtualbox, it requires a non-service install on Windows 10? If so, my machines do not auto-log in, so is there a recommended way to have BOINC run after a reboot as Windows 10 tends to do quite regularly?

Thanks!
Danny

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I cross-posted this on the Rosetta forum here: https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=14650

Falconet posted this:

If BOINC is seeing VirtualBox, you should find a line like this on the event log right after BOINC starts:

15/06/2021 12:18:03 | | VirtualBox version: 6.1.22

It's far from ideal as you have to go to each machine to see that, but better than nothing.

The bigger issue for me, is not being able to use the BOINC service install option. Presumably that's going to be an issue for anyone wanting to run vbox tasks, but on machines that don't have a user logged in, or where the two are wanted to be kept separate.

Does anyone know if it's possible to get a scheduled task to run BOINC as a user? Or is that not sufficient to enable tasks to access Virtualbox?

I guess an alternative is automatically log a user in, start BOINC under that account, and then return to the lockscreen...

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