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1)
Message boards :
Projects :
Urgent: Need a list of BOINC projects that are funded by the U.S Government.
(Message 47731)
Posted 12 Feb 2013 by Mac.teh.Knife Post: The attitude that thwarts you is rampant, pervasive. Nobody has the courage so speak up, call a spade a spade and take action that hurts nobody and helps everybody. We have become nothings in a bowl of homogenized pap where uniformity and conformity rule. Say nothing that departs from the creed and do nothing in the interests of safety, if nobody moves nobody can get hurt. Sad. We blame it on government but really it's our own intolerance and jealousy of anyone who is successful that causes it. For refusing to cave in to that pressure you are a true patriot. You have a long road ahead of you and I wish you well. You realize that when the politicians get wind of this they'll spend 2 years with their thumbs up their butts waiting for somebody to tell them whether it is acceptable to believe BOINC is generally a good thing. If it is deemed acceptable to speak up and say it is a good thing there will be a long and bitter argument between Democrats and Republicans concerning which party first thought of considering BOINC for use on gov't computers. I would suggest the fact that BOINC passed the preliminary testing you mentioned is a positive thing you can mention further up the ladder. It sounds like the people doing the testing approve on a technical level but they won't risk you using BOINC to aid research in anything that is associated with political controversy. So use their "approval on a tech level" to your benefit, milk it for all its worth, and let the higher authorities deal with the political aspects. As for security, using BOINC is a thousand times more safe than say using a web browser to go sniffing around the 'net and sticking your digital nose in whatever unknown, virus infected site run by whatever den of pirates and scammers you may have. BOINC doesn't communicate with just any old website, it connects with project sites that are generally known to the BOINC community. Moreover, those sites are usually run by admins who have more than the average ability with computers and security issues. On top of that you can install BOINC to run in PAE mode adds so the security. In all the years I have run BOINC I have never heard of a single case where it was confirmed BOINC spread a virus to someone's machine or caused any security problem. There have been concerns and investigations and false positives from anti-virus software but no confirmed cases. When you think about it, the mechanisms used to spread virii just aren't there in the BOINC paradigm or are very ineffective. Regarding network traffic, some projects upload/download far more traffic than others. If it's a concern then limit BOINC to crunching projects that require minimal uploads and downloads. |
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2)
Message boards :
Questions and problems :
Something wrong with BOINC Manager?
(Message 47727)
Posted 12 Feb 2013 by Mac.teh.Knife Post: yes the manager is what I mean... The manager and client are both running but the red dot and the "Connecting to localhost" means the manager is unable to connect to the client. The client is the thing that reads the config file, not the manager. Clicking advanced >> read config file merely tells the manager to tell the client to read the config but if manager isn't connected to client then the client never receives the command and will thus not read the config file. It will read the config file whenever it starts but that's all. So the question is why the manager cannot connect to the client. Maybe something to do with permissions is blocking the connection? The two connect and communicate on port 31416. Is that port blocked in your firewall or anti-virus software or anything? Also, you could kill the client via Task Manager then open a command prompt and run the client that way. Unless it hangs or goes berserk it will then log messages to the screen where you will be able to read them. If I understand correctly that is part of the problem... you can't read the log messages... and I have a hunch the client is hanging before it starts logging and before it opens port 31416 and is able to connect with manager. So do something like the following in the command prompt/console/terminal: cd "c:\program files\boinc" boinc.exe and then see what you get (or don't get) for messages on the screen. Another possibility is that BOINC's registry entries are munged. The path to the data dir is stored there. If it's munged then boinc.exe (the client) could be looking at a different data directory or a directory that doesn't exist which could be causing it to hang or simply wait and do nothing so you could also add the parameter to the above command to point to the data dir or check the registry entries to see if the correct path to the data dir is contained therein. |
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3)
Message boards :
Projects :
Urgent: Need a list of BOINC projects that are funded by the U.S Government.
(Message 47724)
Posted 11 Feb 2013 by Mac.teh.Knife Post: Orbit@home was funded entirely by a grant from NASA but last year's application for more funding was denied so that project is on hiatus at the moment. I was going to say Orbit would thus be a bad example to use but when you think about it, it might be the perfect example as the government loves spending money on projects that do nothing and provide no return. A number of BOINC projects are funded by NSF (National Science Foundation). I'm not sure but doesn't NSF get a lot of their money from the US fed. gov.? The most notorious amongst these would be SETI and there is already a movement afoot to have NSF cut funding to SETI since it doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever finding an ET. Not sure how that affects you. Other projects are funded by NSF, for example Einstein@home. Other projects are sponsored by state or private universities and post-secondary institutions. I'm not a US citizen so I'm not sure how funding works in those cases. I know primary and secondary schools are funded federally, not sure about post-secondary institutions. If they are funded entirely by state taxes, then you might argue that the feds could extend some good will to the states at very little cost to them (the hardware is already bought and paid for, it's just a matter of paying the power bill). I wish I could give you a list but you could quickly visit each project's homepage where at the bottom they frequently mention who sponsors/funds them. |
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4)
Message boards :
News :
New project seeks testers
(Message 47718)
Posted 11 Feb 2013 by Mac.teh.Knife Post: They have fixed a number of bugs at this project and it works much better. Be warned that it is very, very different from any other BOINC project you have ever crunched. For example tasks never complete successfully, they always either error out or get cancelled/aborted by the server. Do not be alarmed, that is exactly the way this project is supposed to work. All error and cancelled/aborted (by the server) tasks do useful work and you will get credit for them. The reason why it works that way is explained in the forums. Also, Volpex tasks arrive on your host with a very short deadline of about 5 minutes or less and a high "remaining time" estimate. Do not be alarmed and do not abort the the task. The reason for the short deadline and huge duration estimate is to force the task to start immediately and yes, it will run at high priority. This is necessary for the parallel execution paradigm Volpex is trying to develop. Yes, it does bump their tasks to the front of the line and it does cause other projects to wait but not for long because Volpex tasks are reasonably short in spite of the huge initial duration estimate. If you have set a sensible cache size then there will be no problem and over the long run your resource shares will be honored. For more info on the parallel execution paradigm and why the high priority tasks are necessary see the forums at Volpex. The URL to put in the Add Project wizard is http://volpex.cs.uh.edu/VCP/ |
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5)
Message boards :
Projects :
Grid DVFU
(Message 47717)
Posted 11 Feb 2013 by Mac.teh.Knife Post: Not sure why posting about a BOINC project when it is complete obfuscated what on earth they're supposed to do: http://www.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fgrid.dvfu.ru%2Fsite%2Findex I went to Google translate and pasted the project's URL (http://grid.dvfu.ru) into the translate box and it auto-detected German at that URL. Obviously that won't work and maybe that is why you got "obfuscation", gibberish, whatever. I clicked the "translate from" button and selected Russian instead of German, then clicked Translate and it worked. If you try to attach via the Add Project wizard it won't work at first. I had to find the "create account" page and create an account manually. They sent a verification email, I verified by clicking the link in the email and then was able to add the project via the Add Project wizard. First request for work got a "no work available" response. They don't seem to have forums operational, mostly just pages explaining the DC concept and instructions for joining and attaching. There is no "your account" page, no indication of what kind of research they will conduct. |
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