I would just like to know more info about the kind of technical challenges you will face whilst attempting to port BOINC over to them?
At this time I really don’t know. Until I can get some documentation on the supported API sets it’ll be hard to give any answer. The only thing I’m pretty sure about is that the management interface will have to be written from scratch for each console.
How is the simple GUI coming on any ETA on this?
As far as I know it is almost feature complete. The guys at WCG are probably going to kickstart the beta process with their WCG beta testers since it looks as though we’ll still be putting the finishing touches on 5.6. I believe we’ll start to see clients with the BOINC Simple GUI (BSG) in a few weeks.
Does it work well from what you have seen?
Kevin Reed has been doing an awesome job polishing up the interface. I like what I see and this will give us a way to add more to the Advanced GUI without having to worry about confusing people.
How is the sand-boxing of BOINC on Windows coming along?
I haven’t started that work item yet. I probably won’t be able to start until we have completed our agreements with WCG.
When will 5.6 be released and what are the main improvements?
The best answer I can give about when it will be released is when it is ready. Improvements include a new CPU scheduler and work-fetch policy, CPU feature detection, and video card detection. This release will be the first time the BM will use GTK2 on Linux and sandboxing science applications on the Mac.
Will we ever get column sorting in BOINC Manager?
Someday.
Talk between BOINC projects and BOINC and vise versa seems minimal (and project to project). No-one seems to know what each other is doing, could there be an improvement of talk between them, like modifications to the servers, message boards, stats and developments in the pipeline.
I believe that is what the BOINC Workshops are about. We just finished the second one last week. It was productive and the projects gave us a bunch of work to do. I believe David is going to publish the results of the workshop within a week or two. I won’t know timeframe until after I return from vacation.
Where does BOINC need help?
Hereis a list of things we have identified that we would like to have. Contact David before starting anything though in case somebody else has already started the project. That list is likely to grow after the notes of the second workshop have been processed.
Can you explain more on Average CPU efficiency and Result Duration Correction Factor? There seems to be some confusion about this, and little definite knowledge. For instance, some say a lower RDCF is better, others say an RDCF closer to 1.0 is best. Which is the truth?
I’ll have to get back to you on that. I need to look over the code again.
BOINC version release notes do not seam as complete as they were before or am I looking in the incorrect places?
We are moving toward the firefox style of release notes. For a detailed list of changes you’ll need to lookup the checkin_notes for a specific release. I’ll follow-up in another post on how to do that.
Any plans on releasing the full minutes of what went on (when your back), I read up on the 1st one but was a bit disappointed with the info on show it only gave a brief overview of what went on.
I left the note taking to David and a few others, we’ll just have to wait and see what is published. I wouldn’t have been able to type fast enough to keep up with all the discussion and I still needed to be able to answer questions.
Sorry for being late with this weeks Q@A but I’m still on vacation. 🙂
To submit questions for next week just click on the comments link below and submit your question.
Thanks in advance.
—– Rom