This thread and the idea that started it are interesting and I think that it was fair from Didactylos to say it is not practical for the time being, at least for WCG. Saying it is not practical does not mean that it is silly or that it can never become practical. It is simply saying that you will not raise a high interest here from the WCG staff.

WCG is interested in progressing (+65 % currently for the 30-day indicator over last year) and in marketing, although some people in the forum may well think it is not done as well as they think they would do it. And some people in WCG are always looking for ways to make WCG more visible.

But there are other tasks which must be achieved before thinking of progressing and marketing, it is those tasks which make WCG stable, reliable and living, because it would be a shame to attract people here for nothing valuable.

IBM is a big company and it is 100 % sponsoring WCG, but it will certainly never tell WCG's boss "use any of our resources and spend as much of our money that you want", therefore WCG's boss has to do with the resources he is allowed to use and with the budget he is allowed to spend, as all other serious organizations which want to live longer than an advertising campaign.

At present that means
1. starting WCG's brand new datacenter
2. completing the launch of the Clean Energy Project
3. launching several new projects or new phases in the coming six months

And top of that, keep operations running smoothly every day (which is not the case for several other grids).

In parallel with these tasks there are other less visible or less immediate tasks which WCG has to deal with, like helping scientists when/if they need (like DDDT, Rice or Genome currently, for example), investigating new platforms (e.g. GPUs), and low but still not forgotten, refurbishing this outdated forum.

At present running applications on iPods looks more like an experimental or Research topic than a practical one when compared to the above tasks. Again that does not mean that it is not interesting or that it should be rejected (and it has not been) it only means that it is not currently a viable way for WCG. And personally I think that this thread should not be in the Boinc Agent Support section (which is meant for day-to-day operational problems) of the forum but rather in the Suggestion/Feedback or in the Chat sections.

Andy, keep going on for yourself, and we will be interested to know how it is going, but as others have said don't expect much support from WCG itself.

Cheers. Jean.

What cost is there? If people already have the phone, every bit does help because the phone is more than strong enough to pump out units for projects like Nutritious Rice that have small WUs. Why shouldn't grid computing happen mobile too? It's not really going to "wear out" someone's phone since they are solid state devices, it's not like their hard drive is going to wear out.. Cut the guy some slack. It sounds like a fun project to take on.. even if "impractical" for mass grid computing. ;)

Thank you for your kind support AppleTV!

I am waiting for this Nicolas guy to get in touch - but i dont think he will - in which case I am going to go ahead on my own steam!

Hello MDHC,
You can search for iPod on the BOINC development message forum at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_search.php
You will find discouraging posts such as this one by Nicolas
Lawrence

Nope