Matt Blumberg - Grid Republic and Charity Engine

Steven Clark - Nanohub

And we break for lunch - back in 1 hour.

Can you ask those climate guys to stop making it so darn hot? We're not in Australia or the desert where these temps are normal. :-)

Just been out for a brief wander round the shadier bits of Oxford - phew, it's hot out there. The building the climate guys live in (and which we're borrowing for the week) has a tall atrium, good airflow, and north-facing windows: it's very tolerable by comparison. Maybe they knew something in advance before they moved in?

Listen to David's talk: he had some good factoids. If it's still this hot on Thursday, the UK National Grid will have to reduce electricity supply by 20%, because the wires will go into thermal runaway. And we're running at 97% load already...

While we wait to reconvene - that GPU question. World Community Grid manage the distribution of work to volunteers, but they don't originate the research themselves. That is submitted by partner organistations around the world, and the partners provide the original software they want to be run. WCG can tweak it, but they don't go to the extent of re-writing it for another platform - or for GPUs. If the research partners provide GPU software, WCG can and have distributed it through BOINC - but none of their current projects use GPUs. Not all scientific problems can be designed to run as many simple parallel threads at the same time (which is what a GPU provides): researchers won't write for GPUs unless they have a problem which can be solved that way.

CM - Gridcoin

In response to WCG. Why don't they share the project's source code to others be able to contribute, maybe further optimize or port to other platforms?

In response to WCG. Why don't they share the project's source code to others be able to contribute, maybe further optimize or port to other platforms?

As in my last answer, it isn't their code: they would at the very least need permission from the providing researchers - but that's not insurmountable.

A possibly more significant problem is covered in the talk: WCG is run by IBM, and IBM is careful to protect its reputation. So, for example, even the researcher's code is security-audited before acceptance. But I'll try to get one of the WCG team to reply further.

OK, I asked Juan in the coffee break. WCG tweak the submitted code to work with BOINC (checkpoints etc.), but they are very careful to avoid touching the scientific algorithms. Most of the research code that is submitted to them has been in use for several years, and the researchers are comfortable with its accuracy and reliability. Any 'improvements' would need not only the security vetting, but also a scientific re-audit to be acceptable in a research context.

Team Blocklink AG
(Jan Schotta, Lorenz Langgartner, Maximillian Weigel)

The Innovation Grid
(Macauley Lynch, Richard Phillips)

Slides?

... will be made available by the workshop administrators after it's all over. I've suggested to David Wallom that he should try to associate the slides with these recordings in the official report.

Patrick Schoefer - SETI.Germany
(about team competitions like their Pentathlon)

Ilia Chernov - Inst Applied Math

David Anderson - BOINC

We're moving to more general discussion for the last 15 minutes, I'll record it, but not bother to upload it if we ramble too much[*].

Tomorrow is more centrally devoted to BOINC itself, rather than the projects. I'll have to ask the participants again if it's OK to record them.

* Not really anything useful, except which pub we're adjourning to - the Bear in Blue Boar Street, for anyone local).

And here we go again. Recordings will appear on the same link as yesterday:

BOINC Workshop 2018 - talks audio

Just a brief intro to day 2 to start with.

And this is how we expect the rest of the day to run:

Day 2 schedule

Marius Millea - BOINC server using Docker
(technical - sorry, I can't show the live demo)

Kevin Reed - server release process

Client releases
(Kevin Reed and Richard Haselgrove)

Christian Beer - Software testing
(Software testing and Continuous Integration mechanism review)

Keith Uplinger - unit testing code

Break - we ALL need more coffee.