I have some older machines that I don't mind keeping plugged-in, as long as they're doing something useful, e.g. computing work units for BOINC.

My MacBook1,1 with 32-bit Intel Core Duo is stuck at Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It's running 32-bit BOINC 7.2.42, but I would love to run a newer version of 32-bit BOINC on it, because I'm not sure it's getting all the work units that it can handle. (I'm seeing only 1 task downloaded at a time, but I would expect to see 2 tasks running and 1 waiting to run.)

I keep looking at the Linux downloads (both x86 and x64), and they also seem to be stuck at 7.2.42.

I have an old PowerMac G4. Based on other conversations here I understand that few or no projects are handing out work units that are compatible with the Motorola G4 chip. If that changes, I'm happy to power this baby up again. I understand that its Altivec engine is quite useful for this kind of calculation, if someone cares to write for it.

I also have a Motorola Droid and a Motorola Droid 2 Global that are stuck on their official versions of Android. I'd be happy to run BOINC on those too, if that would be useful to any scientists. I'd even consider updating to Android 4.1 if they can still be rooted and updated.

With kind regards,

Daniel

PS. Anybody for an old ThinkPad 600?

My MacBook1,1 with 32-bit Intel Core Duo is stuck at Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It's running 32-bit BOINC 7.2.42, but I would love to run a newer version of 32-bit BOINC on it, because I'm not sure it's getting all the work units that it can handle. (I'm seeing only 1 task downloaded at a time, but I would expect to see 2 tasks running and 1 waiting to run.)

If you have work request/caching problems that's more down to a wrong setting for the Store at least N days of work and Store and additional N days of work settings in the preferences.

As for why BOINC 7.4 is only 64bit, that's because Apple dropped 32bit support since OS X 10.7 (Lion). There's no use to build 32bit applications when all apps on the computer are 64bit, the OS is 64bit, the CPU is 64bit, etc.

So 7.2.42 is the last 32bit version of BOINC built for the 32bit versions of OS X. At one time support for older OSes is dropped, due to not many people running the hardware anymore.

I keep looking at the Linux downloads (both x86 and x64), and they also seem to be stuck at 7.2.42.

That's because for a long time there were problems with wxWidgets 3.0 giving errors on building BOINC 7.4 under Linux. It took several months to fix those problems, and not all distros out there have updated their wxWidgets version yet to fix these problems, so releasing a 7.4 built with wxWdigets 3.0.1 or 3.0.2 will then result in lots of people complaining about errors being thrown.
Building BOINC 7.4 with wxWidgets 2.8.0 is no option, because of some changes to the code to accommodate wxWidgets 3.0; besides it works on Windows and OS X, so it just has to be fixed in Linux.

I have an old PowerMac G4. Based on other conversations here I understand that few or no projects are handing out work units that are compatible with the Motorola G4 chip. If that changes, I'm happy to power this baby up again. I understand that its Altivec engine is quite useful for this kind of calculation, if someone cares to write for it.

Building applications and debugging them costs money. Easily done on widely used hardware/OSes, but costly if there's only a handful of them available.
Projects are also going for the faster and better GPU support, easier done.

As for the Droids, there are third party BOINC versions out there that may be able to run on them. But all these versions have the problem that they do not send the Android version back to the projects, while the projects are actively changing their back-end to get Android devices to send the Android version to them, to weed out which applications to send to them. This because of a change in how Android uses applications in 4.2 and onwards (but mostly 5.0+), which requires that projects know exactly what Android version your app runs, or else they send the wrong application which then only returns errors.

Sometimes it's better to just retire old hardware.

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Thanks, Jord. That was a really useful and informative answer.

It seems like there must be a natural tension between the owners of old hardware (from looking through forum posts I know I'm not the only person who would like to run BOINC work on old hardware, or exotic (S/390!?) hardware), and the maintainers of the science projects themselves, who, together with the BOINC developers, have to make decisions about how to compile the work units and client code.

I wonder if there's room to start a new platform for BOINC that runs bytecode of some kind. Instead of having to target only the prevalent, current OSes and hardware platforms, work-unit developers could have this bytecode platform as an additional target, confident that as long as a BOINC client can read the bytecode, work units will get processed and results returned.

Right now we have a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure, it's true that our older computers are breaking down and being junked or recycled. That causes a marked drop in the number of clients that are running on such platforms (say, 32-bit Windows). Because you cannot expect work-unit developers to produce work units that run on the "long tail" platforms, it's not cost-effective to keep updating BOINC clients for those platforms.

But it's also true that a lot of your current volunteers, and perhaps a chunk of prospective volunteers as well, have more than one of these "long tail" platforms sitting around, and would be willing to keep it powered-on solely for the purpose of contributing to one or more BOINC projects. That hardware is being shoved out the door.

If BOINC could get to the place that work units were platform agnostic, there should be a marked increase in the number of work units being performed as volunteers bring back their old hardware.

I know it's a dream. But it would make a strong pitch: "Hey, that old computer that you retired because it was JUST TOO SLOW . . . ? Yeah, fire it back up and give it something useful to do. Something charitable."

With kind regards,

Daniel

I have an old PowerMac G4. Based on other conversations here I understand that few or no projects are handing out work units that are compatible with the Motorola G4 chip. If that changes, I'm happy to power this baby up again. I understand that its Altivec engine is quite useful for this kind of calculation, if someone cares to write for it.

http://wuprop.boinc-af.org/results/delai.py?plateforme=mac_ppc&tri=projet&sort=asc&min=&max=

Naturally, the project developers are going to spend their time working on the platforms which will generate the biggest return for them. However, BOINC is open source--so any interested parties can tweak or adapt it to their operating system of choice, if they have the knowledge and the time. The software run by the projects themselves can be a different story, as some are using commercial software whose licenses don't allow this.

Although I doubt you'll ever see official BOINC or project support for older platforms, support for Android started with the community first before it became an official platform. And, there are plenty of other people out there who make optimized apps for various projects, and apps for OSes and hardware that aren't officially supported by the project or BOINC. So, I think your best bet is to find other people who have a common interest in seeing BOINC and project X running on hardware Y, and pool your resources.[/url]

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