[Info-vax] BOINC for VMS

[Hans Vlems]

On 8 mrt, 14:05, Neil Rieck <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Back in the day, there were techies at Compaq who made sure there were SETI-at-home clients available for Alpha and you could see the reason why: Alpha platforms beat every other platform out there. Around the time that Compaq was acquired by HP, SETI-at-home support was ended. Also at that time, other companies like SUN and IBM stepped up with software, hardware donations, and money just so they could get their names associated with distributed computing.
>
> ( since then, IBM has developed their own on-ramp to BOINC called "world community grid"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_community_grid)
>
> I, too, supported SETI-at-home but must admit that large conservative corporations would rather be involved with more practical projects involving things like: protein analysis, searching for new designer drugs to combat human disease, improving climate models, etc. (I can hear it now: IBM will one day announce "we cured cancer" while the others were just being greedy)
>
> There is nothing wrong with thinking about putting some old Alphas to work on a BOINC project but I fear you will just be wasting electrical energy. The best results come from systems with DDR2 and DDR3 memory (most Alpha systems have neither but I don't know about the EV7z generation), fast I/O buses, large CPU and memory caches (L1/L2/L3), and large amounts of memory. Some science projects now require x86 Streaming Extensions (MMX/SSE2, etc)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions
> "None x86 systems" get around this requirement by employing many thousands of streaming processors found in today's video cards. "x86 system" go this route too. (sure you could use a CPU to generate sound but a sound card can do it many orders of magnitude faster; it is the same thing with doing science on a graphics card)
>
> Now Folding-at-home does support a cool SMP client which would be perfect to try out on an Itanium box. I wonder if hobbyists have tried getting a BOINC client to run on one of these.
>
> (p.s. I am a huge fan of distributed processing and, like many others, have set up a small folding-farm to do my bit. In the winter time the additional heat from these systems causes me to burn a lesser amount of fossil fuels. In the summer time they drive out the dampness of my basement while making the air-conditioner run a little more ofter. Oh well, you win some, you lose some)
>
> Neil Rieck
> Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/folding_at_home.html

I ran SETI on one, later two Alpha Server 1200 5/533 systems (dual cpu
each) during the last two years of the SETI project. The systems
managed to stay in the top 5 of the group that started on the same
day.
It was not possible to build BOINC (I can't program C++ and wasn't
willing to learn it).
I agree that SETI and BOINC can do a lot for marketing, especially
when hobbyist systems can compete too.
But we know what happened to Alpha. Even if VMS was ported to Intel's
x64 platform I and given proper FP support I wouldn't try to join
BOINC.
Hans