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World Community Grid Forums
Category: Support
Forum: BOINC Agent Support
Thread: BOINC Agent in a Large Organisation |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 4
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Good morning/afternoon/evening all,
My apologise if this has been answered before, but I have done a quick read of the forum and cannot find an answer. I represent a large government organisation that is involved in the delivery of health care to approx 3.5million people. Our IT infrastructure consists of 25000+ workstations, which are used primarily for administrative functions throughout the organisation. I am investigating the viability of using the idle CPU time on these workstations to contribute to a distributed computing effort that is also involved in the health care arena. I have read some of the well prepared documentation on large deployments of the workstation agent, and I am confident that our IT staff will have no problems deploying this application to every workstation through the Zenworks tools we currently use to maintain our SOE. The reason for my post is to ask whether or not there is a method of 'mirroring' a small portion of the WCG data on servers internal to my organisation so that workstations do not need to access the internet to participate? I would envisage that these local servers would, each night collect data that needed processing, and deposit processed data back to the WCG servers. Then, throughout the day the fleet of 25000 workstations would collect their data from the local servers and return their results back to the local servers for forwarding at a later time. Any assistance is greatly appreciated. Thanks Adam. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hello bullocha,
----------------------------------------I am not an expert, but I have been reading a lot of posts these last 2 years. The public distributed computer projects (listed at http://distributedcomputing.info/projects.html ) do not have this capability. Instead, they allow you to set a communication window (for example, only communicate between 2 AM and 3 AM). BOINC ( http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ the system that best fits your needs, in my opinion) allows each computer to draw a number of work units and cache them locally. BOINC is being continuously developed and upgraded, but I have not heard of a server hierarchy under development for it. Lawrence Added: If your organization uses Linux, you might be interested in Open Science Grid ( http://www.opensciencegrid.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&elMenu=Home ) which does use local servers, but it takes a large commitment to install it. [Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Sep 1, 2006 11:06:27 AM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Hi Adam,
It's unfortunate BOINC doesn't have the server heirarchy and mirror function you seek. I imagine that capability would simplify a lot of security issues for your organisation and other similar organisations. It would be nice if you could allow workstations to communicate directly with WCG servers but security is paramount in health care delivery systems. The next version of BOINC (5.6.0, now in pre-release) uses better certificate authentication than previous BOINC veresions, if that helps any. Sorry, I'm not an IT pro, perhaps my suggestion is naive. Not an IT pro but I am a dreamer. I dream of the day when every workstation at every large enterprise runs BOINC. I deam of the day when there are many servers located around the world serving WCG work units to their organisation. I see the potential for those servers to do more than just distribute WUs to attached workstations, they could also run the BOINC scheduler, replicator, validator, etc. and be entirely responsible for handling a chunk of WUs from beginning to end, returning canonical results to the central WCG sever ready to be passed on to the research team. Yes, I dream, and why not? Maybe you dream too, Adam. Rom Walton is one name I know connected to the BOINC development team. If you are interested in pursuing the dream further then contact Rom. He has a website. You said your organisation is government, sometimes funds and resources can be "realloctaed" easily in government organisations. You may be able to work with Rom or other members of the BOINC development team, write some code, create the mirror system you seek and contribute it to the BOINC community. Just a dream but so many wonderful things start just that way. Of course there are legal implications associated with a non-WCG server "sub-contracting" as described above. WCG's agreements with the research team may not allow it but who knows. Contracts can be renegotiated, sometimes very quickly when major benefits can be acquired at little cost. |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
For any large scale deployment, WCG are happy to give you assistance directly. To contact the right people, send email to support@worldcommunitygrid.org outlining your plans.
While there isn't any mechanism like the one you describe, you should be able to get the behaviour you want using BOINC's more advanced configuration options, and perhaps a proxy server. If not, then a custom solution isn't out of the question. It will take a lot longer to set up, though. I suggest you try a pilot project with a cluster of workstations and a proxy server. You can limit external communications to the WCG servers only, and only during the night. BOINC can easily queue enough work for a day's disconnected operation. |
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