Everything You Need To Know About World Community Grid/BOINC

[sierra_bound]

Welcome! Whether you are a non-WCG member, a beginner or a dedicated cruncher, this is the thread you will find everything you need to know about World Community Grid and BOINC.

World Community Grid (WCG):

Our Mission, Our Work and You
World Community Grid's mission is to create the world's largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity.

Our work has developed the technical infrastructure that serves as the grid's foundation for scientific research. Our success depends upon individuals collectively contributing their unused computer time to change the world for the better.

World Community Grid is making technology available only to public and not-for-profit organizations to use in humanitarian research that might otherwise not be completed due to the high cost of the computer infrastructure required in the absence of a public grid. As part of our commitment to advancing human welfare, all results will be in the public domain and made public to the global research community.

Our Sponsor
IBM Corporation, a leader in the creation, development and manufacture of the industry's most advanced information technologies, has donated the hardware, software, technical services and expertise to build the infrastructure for World Community Grid and provides free hosting, maintenance and support.

How Grid Technology Works
Making a difference has never been easier! Grid technology is simple and safe to use. To start, you register, then download and install a small program or "agent" onto your computer.

When idle, your computer will request data on a specific project from World Community Grid's server. It will then perform computations on this data, send the results back to the server, and ask the server for a new piece of work. Each computation that your computer performs provides scientists with critical information that accelerates the pace of research!

To learn more about World Community Grid's current research, please link to our Research area.

World Community Grid runs on software called BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, developed at University of California, Berkeley, USA with funding from NSF (National Science Foundation).

Source: http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/ab...viewAboutUs.do

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing:

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a non-commercial middleware system for volunteer and grid computing. It was originally developed to support the SETI@home project before it became useful as a platform for other distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. The intent of BOINC is to make it possible for researchers to tap into the enormous processing power of personal computers around the world.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkele...work_Computing

Guidelines:

• How to register WCG and join XtremeSystems by hotwaxisbad
• How to install BOINC on Ubuntu Linux by s0lid

For those of you wondering where to find team and individual stats for WCG and BOINC, here are some links.

WCG Stats

• XS Team Stats
• XS Individual Stats
• All-time Stats for All Teams
• All-time Stats for All Users

BOINC Stats

• XS Team Stats at BOINCstats
• All-time Team Stats at BOINCstats
• All-time User Stats at BOINCstats
• XS Team Stats at BOINC Synergy
• All-Time Team Stats at BOINC Synergy
• XS Team Stats at Free-DC
• XS CPU Stats
• XS OS Stats

More:

• How to install & setup WCG
• BOINC credit/points explained
• Free-DC stats sig guide
• Additional sig information
• Change to Standard Client Now - Step by Step
• If anyone still needs a reason to crunch.
• Pics of your FARM!
• BOINC benchmark: post results
• Innovation Cooling's Diamond 7 TIM test results
• Auto Suspend for gaming and other apps
• How to install and set up BoincView

There have been a number of questions regarding the results status page. The definitions of these status' are shown below:

* Work In Progress - This means that one of your computers is currently working on it
* Aborted - has 2 prefixes, Server Aborted and User Aborted for canceled jobs before or during running. Server Aborted reflects the Server side instructed cancellations telling the client to automatically abort redundant or known bad tasks. Latter only happens when the client has contacted the project servers who set such an instruction ready.
* Detached - When a newer client gets dis-associated from this project with tasks still in the cache, will a message be send to the servers to ensure that these tasks get quickly redistributed. With older clients this would not happen and task copies would not get send until the "No Reply" condition occurred.
* Error - Some event occurred to keep the result from finishing properly. This could be due to a BOINC error or a science application error.
* No Reply - The result was not returned to the server by the time it was due.
* Pending Validation - The result was returned to the server but there have not been enough results for that workunit returned to the server yet for validation to be attempted
* Valid - The result was returned to the server and was equal to the majority of results returned for the workunit.
* Invalid - The result was returned to the server and was not found to be equal to the majority of results returned for the workunit.
* Inconclusive - The result was returned to the server and validation was attempted but the system could not determine which result(s) it should consider to be valid. New results were sent out for this workunit and validation will be attempted again when those results are returned. Additionally, for the Zero Redundancy projects one or more results are at times randomly marked Inconclusive to force out an additional copy for computation and verification. Clients which produced an invalid/error result will see this more frequent until the reliability rate has returned to high standard.
* Too Late - The result was returned to the server a long time after it was due and so no credit was granted.
* Other - The most common reason for this status is that the BOINC server decided that the workunit should be sent out to another computer but prior to the workunit actually being sent again, the workunit was validated.
* Waiting to sent - A transient condition when not all copies of a Initial distribution have been downloaded by volunteer clients. Seen also when a project has been temporarily stopped.

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