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Category: Support
Forum: Suggestions / Feedback
Thread: Raspberry Pi & WCG |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 53
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
So the other day I took a plunge into the world of Raspberry Pi and thought it'd be great to test it out on some BOINC projects, namely WCG!
I normally undertake a decent amount of research before I do such things, but this time I didn't and only found out afterwards that the Raspberry Pi isn't supported with the WCG project (link ). Whilst I'm able to crunch some other projects and have a number of other interests to try out with the new kit; I'd like to explore the possibility of expanding the list of supported devices to include the Pi2 (only recently released, model details here ). Is anyone else interested in this or looking to crunch data with low-power devices? I've seen some good whitepapers on clustering the Pi hardware and it looks quite impressive. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
One of the BOINC Manager features is, that if selecting a project for attaching, there's actually a set of icons on right, below the project description, to indicate which platforms are supported. Some projects have a red faced fox [is what it looks to me] and a cube in the icon set. WCG's list is that of Windows, OSX, Linux, ATI, NVidia, Android. So, everyone is being informed -before- adding a project, that is, those that actually look at the information offered.
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OldChap
Veteran Cruncher UK Joined: Jun 5, 2009 Post Count: 978 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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various low power processors/tablets etc have been tried on here.
----------------------------------------I hoped the Pi2 would run WCG but may have to wait for folks far more clever than I it seems  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Anything with x86/x64 processors and a CPU set that is ARM compliant goes. Processor emulators on PI, that would be the day...
The red foxed face icon is probable a raspberry [duh]... at least this is an enlargement of the icon found on the intertubes when searching for the platform  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hi Rob,
Yes the icon is that of a Raspberry! I'm using v7.2.47 of the BOINC manager, which doesn't show any projects with the RasPi icon next to them. With that said I've never added another project to my list as I only compute for WCG these days. I just updated to the latest (v7.4.36 at the time of typing) and seems that this is still the same. Nevertheless, I still refer to the list of projects on the BOINC website (see the first link in my original post). You mention that anything ARM compliant should work, but the Pi2 is an ARM7 CPU and the message I get is something to the effect of "This project doesn't support computers of type arm-unknown-linux-gnueadihf". Thoughts? |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
So doing some more research, it seems that the ARM processor is only supported (by WCG) on Android.
So, I'll test my Pi2 with Android once it's finished the current tasks for Enigma@Home..... |
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Eric_Kaiser
Veteran Cruncher Germany (Hessen) Joined: May 7, 2013 Post Count: 1047 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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No, every project must supply applications that support linux on arm. Than there might be a chance that PI2 might work as rasbian is a debian derivate.
----------------------------------------WCG has no application that supports linux on arm. That was the reason why my odroid u3 were setup with android instead of ubuntu.  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Aurillian said he was going to try loading Android onto his PI2. Of course it must be the version that understands PIE, and of course the platform identifier must be the one by which the server distributor recognizes the device as an Android, or there will be that message like "This project doesn't support computers of type arm-unknown-linux-gnueadihf".
BTW, googling around, there seem to be Android apps for Raspberry even instructions to install Android 2.3 onto it: http://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-install-android-2-3-on-the-raspberry-pi/ even " Android 4.0 for the Pi with hardware acceleration is in the works, but if you're itching to try the earlier version out, here's what you'll have to do... " It would have to be v4.1 with the mentioned PIE functionality.  |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hi again,
Apologies for the late reply, but after the system finished the Enigma@Home work, I swapped out the SD to another build for a different purpose (arcade emulators!). The best thing about the Pi is that the system runs entirely on the SD, so you can swap out builds or build functions for the cost of another SD card. I've got a bunch lying around, so I've configured them as different purposes and configs as part of a benchmarking test (details to follow once I've run through the test cases). I did see that only Android v2.3 is the only working android build on the Pi, apparently the v4.0 build has been officially abandoned by Broadcom, so now it's back to the open development community.... I notice that Enigma@Home is supported by both Linux and Android, so I'll do some performance benchmarking on both and let you know the outcome. I suspect the performance will be better on the Raspian build that I'm currently using...... When doing initial comparison between one WU on my Pi2 & my i7 rig, I noticed that the i7 was about seven times faster/more efficient. This is using Win7 and has dual GTX560TI GPUs and 15 more GB of RAM, but when the Pi2 is pulling 898W less, well.... I'd be more inclined to get a bunch of these and run them 24/7. Some other folk have clustered these with decent effect, for ~$35 each, I could build a RPi cluster for less than a quarter of what I build my games/development rigs for..... http://coen.boisestate.edu/ece/files/2013/05/...ed.Beowulf.Cluster_v2.pdf |
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TimAndHedy
Senior Cruncher Joined: Jan 27, 2009 Post Count: 267 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Just the thread I was looking for.
I am also look at buying a couple of Pi 2. The linux/arm combination should be seriously looked at for support. X86 improvements have slowed to a crawl lately while arm is steadily catching up. The speed improvements seen from the initial PI to Pi 2 have not been seen in the X86 world for many years. |
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