Day: August 25, 2006

BOINC Workshop and Vacations

So I’m starting to get prepared for various trips in September.

For the first week in September I’ll be traveling to Anchorage, Alaska to meet my new niece. My sister gave birth to her first child a couple weeks ago, so this will be something of a new experience for me. On the 6th I’ll be leaving Alaska and head to Florida to check out my new diggs which I’ll be moving to at the end of November. On the 11th I’ll be returning home for a week. I bought some toys for my nieces and nephew, holy cow, toys are expensive.

September 18th I leave for Geneva, Switzerland to attend the The 2nd Pan-Galactic BOINC Workshop. I’m looking forward to meeting several of the scientists of the European BOINC based projects. I found out today that David Kim of R@H is going to go to the conference, so we are trying to sync up for the long flight over. My grandparents are going to meet me in Geneva and after the conference we are going to go tour around for a bit. Right now, I really don’t know where I’m going or where I’m going to stay, it is going to be something of a surprise. My grandparents are a lot of fun to travel with and I’m really looking forward to it.

On the 28th I head back state side and recoup. I’m sure the next couple of days after that will be spent relearning all the things I will have forgotten about BOINC. That is normally the sign of a really great vacation.

I have turned off various forms of article tracking for the blog that spammers like to try and abuse, so the favorites section won’t change while I’m away. Sorry about that, but I don’t know what my Internet connectivity situation will be like next month and I really don’t want to come back to a bunch of auto insurance, and poker advertisements to clean up.

—– Rom

BOINC and the gaming consoles

A very common request we have from the community is to be able to run BOINC and various projects on a gaming console, whether it be the PS3, XBOX360, or Wii.

As many have heard Folding@Home has announced that they have a client package for the PS3.

This is great news for all distributed computing projects, personally I think this will begin the domino effect of having all the console manufacturers want to be able to support this kind of development.

We had gotten some push back from one of the manufacturers about doing something like this at the begining of the year and since we had the stuff with the CPDN/BBC to do and then stuff with WCG we decided to put the console issue on hold. We are almost done the the WCG workitems and the CPDN/BBC stuff is already done.

When Microsoft announced XNA Game Studio Express I applied to participate in the Beta. Now I need to get ahold of the SDKs for the PS3 and Wii.

People should realize however, this is only half the battle. Once BOINC is ported, we’ll have to get a few projects running on a console.

This kind of adds another diminsion to the whole notion of console wars. I mean, can you imagine one of the administrative staff at a university getting a request to purchase 5,000 PS3s? I would really love to be in that office when that request hits their desk.

—– Rom