BOINCpe

[UBT - Halifax-lad]

BOINCpe has gone public

See website here

With BOINCpe you can run a dedicated BOINC machine in-RAM (using a RAM disk) starting from only 256 MB of total RAM. This is useful to operate your BOINC farm more energy-efficient (without HDDs) or to temporarily activate machines without hard disk drives (HDD) for BOINC.

[UBT - Timbo]

BOINCpe has gone public

See website here

Very interesting:

Let me get this right. You can burn a CDROM with BOINCpe, which will then enable you to run BOINC somehow (maybe some operating system is required on the CDROM to boot the PC?) and then BOINCpe runs from a RAMdrive. (Sorry, haven't done my homework on what the reference to "Bart" is !)

So, if the power fails, you lose all your work unless BOINCpe can be made to upload completed work as soon as it's completed. A good reason to have a UPS then.

Or else, a way of not having to access the HDD during the crunching, althought that won't really save any power, as the HDD will still be spinning (unless the mobo can tell the HDD to power down, like on some "greener" PC's and laptops).

regards

Tim

[UBT - Halifax-lad]

I dunno don't ask me

Not looked into it much as yet

[UBT - Halifax-lad]

Found this on Q&A

Q: I’m not sure about storing all BOINC data on a RAM disk. All data is lost on reboot. What can I do to prevent this?
A: You’re right! Thing is though, a typical machine being used with BOINCpe will be running continuously for days, weeks or even longer. A sudden reboot (e.g. on power failure) is generally not to be expected. And if it happens, the loss of data is not very severe since BOINC follows a long-term strategy. In my opinion, losing data for 24 hours of BOINC computation once a year is not as critical as running several hard disk drives for a year!
There is an optional plugin called ‘Persistency Service’ provided with BOINCpe, which performs a daily backup to a specified network share (at 12:00 AM). This gives a chance to backup at least all computations and general BOINC data changed within the last 24 hours. Please see: BOINCpe Advanced Configuration

[UBT - Timbo]

Found this on Q&A

Aha !! Thanks for that.

So sounds like a good-un.....and nicely thought out....knew it had to be...just a question of finding all the relevant bits...

I used to run SETI Classic and SETI Driver in a RAM disk, way back when HDD's were slow and expensive (compared to now).

Used a batch file to copy the stuff over to RAMdisk and then run from there - happy memories !

regards

Tim

[UBT - Halifax-lad]

Probably won't be anything I ever use, but at least it is there for others who are interested in getting rid of loads of running hard disks in their farms