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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: Suggestions / Feedback
Thread: Sources / licensing |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 13
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Back the truck up a minute. Matter of fact they do distribute software. Opensource requires instructions on obtaining the code to be given with binaries. Otherwise it's a violation of the (here non-existent) user's freedoms.1. If the code is open source, then go find it. It is not up to WCG to distribute it. The role of WCG is to crunch scientific applications, not distribute software code. 2. If the code is not open source, then your demand that it be, is irrelevant. It would be irrelevant if it was opensource..3. If you want a 64 port then you volunteer a year or two of your time to create the port. Don't sit on the outside and toss grenades at the staff. 1. If you read what I said, this doesn't take two years of effort. But considering the code is closed, there is nothing anyone can do other than sit outside. People happily contribute such efforts to open projects.2. If you read what I said.. I don't want a 64-bit port. It will be equally useless to me as the 32-bit port without the sources. 4. Just because you did not get the answer to your 64 port question, does not make the answer any less relevant. I don't want a 64-bit port.5. Just because you can't find the code does not mean that WCG is hiding the code. See #1 & #2 above. I don't want a 64-bit port.6.The 85,000+ daily users on WCG are not using 64 OSs but I am sure that if you prove that you can more users to run WCG on one 64 OS than we already have on either Linux or Mac, then the priority of the 64 port will increase. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
That's plain wrong and I am surprised that you, a regular user of WCG forums, could write that. There are no specific 64-bit versions of the applications, but they are all running on 64-bit OSs with the appropriate libraries and many of us do it and produce up to 25-30 % more work depending on the projects they are crunching. Quite right Jean. I was in error to suggest that no one was running W64. As you said, people are running the applications in 32bit mode. While you get more performance in certain WU, you are still not running 64 bit mode applications. |
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robertmiles
Senior Cruncher US Joined: Apr 16, 2008 Post Count: 445 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Finally, something maybe you didn't know: some of the research software we use is written in FORTRAN. All of it is old, with a long history of constant evolution. This is normal for scientific software. It doesn't make porting easy. Yes, I've talked to a person involved in a different BOINC-based project that is also closed-source. Their reasoning was that the application required quite accurate floating point arithmetics and that there existed a popular FORTRAN compiler which provided insufficient accuracy and they were afraid people might be using that compiler and be submitting bad results to them. So it was a kind of measure against having modified/miscompiled applications on people's computers. It's obviously not an ideal protection and I think this is similar to "security through obscurity". I don't know much about FORTRAN but I suppose there exists a formal specification telling you what accuracy you can rely on and beyond that your program isn't really a correct FORTRAN program. Cheers Back when I was working in FORTRAN, I saw no signs of one. |
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