I started volunteering some of my extra computers’ idle time for the World Community Grid in December, 2013. Unfortunately, the machine in question, a used computer I’d bought about five years earlier and, after having been used as a desktop for a few years, had been converted to being a server under CentOS, died from a “thermal event” nine months later. It had completed 713 results and earned 419,591 points.
In 2016, I found a P4 3.4GHz machine, installed CentOS 7 on it, and then the BOINC infrastructure. I assigned it to the World Community Grid and 100% of its capacity to the project. From when it began in September, 2016 to today, it has completed 4,540 results, and earned 2,568,590 points.
In 2017, I finally converted my old netbook (32 bit atom processor) to CentOS 6 and did the same thing. From when it began in April until today, it has completed 261 results, and earned 133,073 points. (What a difference in capacity that 3.4GHz 64 bit has as compared to 1.6GHz 32 bit!)
Over the past few months, I have been collecting up a number of old machines which have come my way, including some IBM ThinkCentres from the Windows Vista era. So far, my brother and I haven’t been able to get them running properly, and we will probably end up using them for spare parts.
In the meantime, we acquired two more computers. My brother wanted / needed a replacement computer for his aging media server, an old reclaimed IBM ThinkCentre I’d gotten for him a few years ago. I, in the meantime, wanted to add another node to the World Community Grid (of course, working at 100% of capacity.)
I chose CentOS 7 for this build, like I did for my other nodes, for what I consider to be the obvious reason that I want to pretty much forget about the computers and just relish in the numbers on the World Community Grid website — I don’t want to be re-installing every year!
The install went well enough, although it was long enough process for the base install, as compared to my laptop and desktop. I will rule out the comparison to my laptop since the SSD and physical drive don’t compare at all. As for the desktop and node, I’ll chalk up the difference mainly to processor speed and general architectures: A 2015-era four core i5 running at 3.4GHZ vs a 2010 era Pentium dual-core E6500 running at 2.93GHz (no HyperThreading).
What was really long after that was the yum update after the initial install — about 650 packages! In the process of the updates, I tried a few things like web surfing, and the gnome desktop became unstable; I ended up with a flashing text screen. I finally rebooted, and tried to downgrade to an older kernel in GRUB, to no avail. I tried the rescue kernel, no avail. Under both situations, I couldn’t pull up a terminal with Alt-Ctrl-F2. A quick check under a Fedora live environment was a waste of time, since I didn’t really know how to diagnose things; however, I was able to mount the CentOS drive.
There was some flirting with the idea of installing Fedora 27, but I don’t want the re-installation mill on this machine (or any of my other volunteer computing nodes) every year — although, seeing my brother upgrade from Fedora 25 to 27 through the GUI go as smoothly as a routine DNF upgrade is making me wonder if the point is moot. (Note that CentOS 7, based on Fedora 19, is still using YUM, while Fedora has been using DNF since version 22.)
Finally, I restarted the install of CentOS, this time doing a minimal text install. Things were a touch faster. Then I did a yum update, with only about half as many packages to update. After that, I installed the Gnome Desktop on the machine. (Here’s my archive.)
I continued with the installation of the Fedora EPEL repository (as root “wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm”, then “rpm -ivh epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm”). Installing the BOINC infrastructure was easy: As root “yum install boinc*”.
I launched the BOINC manager from one of the pull down menus, and, to my surprise, it actually worked out of the box, unlike previous installations. Someone must have updated the packages. 🙂 I added the World Community Grid website information, and my account and password.
Voilà ! At 12:00 UTC the next morning, my machine had already submitted FIVE results, and earned 2,429 points! And, at 00:00 UTC as I’m completing this post, a total of EIGHT results, and 4,638 points!