BOINC for private, local projects

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XyDrKRulof

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Joined: 23 Feb 21
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Message 103136 - Posted: 23 Feb 2021, 7:34:51 UTC
Last modified: 23 Feb 2021, 7:37:11 UTC

Hello there,

I am currently evaluating the usability of BOINC for a project we have in a university context. What we would like to do is distributing tasks from different computers of the scientists/engineers to volunteering, free computers in our local network. This could be for example the student computers or also computers from other scientists/engineers.

Now I am evaluating whether it could be a good idea to use BOINC as an underlying system. It seems to have a lot of what we could need: Distributing tasks to volunteers, allowing to work with docker and thus enables us to be free of OS restrictions, allows to run nicely in the background, adding tasks on runtime, etc.

Just from reading the doc I have trouble to find out the following, though:

1. Is it possible to use BOINC without publishing the project on the internet?
2. Is it then possible to keep BOINC restricted to our local network?
3. Is it then possible to connect to our local BOINC project without setting up an account?
4. Is it possible that a volunteering node is not offering all but a subset of available resources? E.g. only 2 CPU cores and 32gb of memory?
5. From what I've gathered the output of a Docker Container executed on a volunteering node will be sent as a zip to the server? Can this be bypassed in some config to go to different destinations?

If you have additional documents for my questions (e.g. links to the doc I might've not seen yet) that would be very helpful. Thanks in advance.
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Profile David Anderson
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Message 103180 - Posted: 24 Feb 2021, 4:44:24 UTC - in response to Message 103136.  

1) You can run a BOINC project behind a firewall and configure the firewall to hide it from the rest of the Internet.
2) ditto
3) No; when the client attaches to a project it's always to an account
4) Yes; see https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Preferences
5) Output files can be sent to any server.
This can be specified in different ways depending on how the job is submitted; see
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/JobTemplates
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/RemoteJobs

Please post to the boinc_projects email list if you have other questions,
or email me directly.
-- David
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XyDrKRulof

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Joined: 23 Feb 21
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Message 103181 - Posted: 24 Feb 2021, 7:10:52 UTC - in response to Message 103180.  
Last modified: 24 Feb 2021, 7:11:02 UTC

Hello David,

thanks for your fast reply, it is very helpful. We will look into the answers you provided and will, in case of more questions, contact through the channels you gave us.

Cheers
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Message boards : Questions and problems : BOINC for private, local projects

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