Raspberry PI

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Graham ID: 2422 Posts: 27
09 Feb 2013 12:23 PM

Has anyone managed to get Charity Engine running on a raspberry pi?

I installed BOINC on raspbian, switched on charity engine as account manager and all the projects were listed in the account manager but everything has stalled and  I get the message "waiting to contact project servers" in the main window.

I have updated each project using the project command window and get the amount of work already done displayed.  But still nothing happens and no work is fetched.

Any advice or hints would be appreciated.

 

 

Jonathan Brier ID: 159 Posts: 112
09 Feb 2013 05:54 PM

It is great to see such excitement around getting Charity Engine on other platforms.  We currently do not have any projects that support ARM architecture at this time only x86 architecture.  

We are exploring ARM support for future applications.  Applications that run on Android devices would likely be the first major ARM support, but that is coming down the road... It would not that hard to port to support other ARM devices at that time.

There is some interesting work going on to support x86 on ARM such as discussed in this article http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4397620/Russian-software-runs-x86-code-on-ARM though their 2014 delivery for great performance is still a while off.

We are glad to have your support and enthusiasm for Charity Engine!  I hope this answers your questions.

G
Graham ID: 2422 Posts: 27
09 Feb 2013 07:06 PM

What a shame, having got boinc running I might point it at something else until you have ARM support on your projects.

Thanks.

Mark McA ID: 179 Posts: 224
10 Feb 2013 03:21 PM

Funny you should mention the brilliant Raspberry Pi, we plan to give some away as prizes later this year. We share the same mission in many ways; the 'whole world computing', etc. (Same reason we love things like www.codecadamy.com.) 

BOINC on Raspi - and on ARM generally - has a lot of interest. Apart from anything else, the most energy-efficient unused computing on Earth belongs to a billion 1GHz+ smartphone CPUs doing nothing at night except charge a battery, together wasting over 200 exaFLOPS... It's mind-boggling.

You might find this chap's blog useful too: http://burdeview.blogspot.com.au/p/raspberry-pi-boinc-project-ive-created.html 

Cheers,

Mark

Graham Jenkins ID: 1626 Posts: 160
04 May 2015 09:49 PM

So, do we have any projects that CE can run on a Raspberry-Pi now?

Graham Jenkins ID: 1626 Posts: 160
11 May 2015 06:26 AM

I guess that's a "No!" ??

Mark McA ID: 179 Posts: 224
26 May 2015 10:48 AM

Hi Graham,

Sorry, we missed this post! Right now; nothing really suitable for a Raspi, but we do have a distributed web-monitoriong app coming online soon which should work fine. (It uses very little CPU.)

Cheers,

Mark

Graham Jenkins ID: 1626 Posts: 160
26 May 2015 08:51 PM

Thanks Mark, keep me posted! :)

Graham Jenkins ID: 1626 Posts: 160
13 Jul 2015 09:58 AM

Any progress with this yet?

Mark McA ID: 179 Posts: 224
13 Jul 2015 12:52 PM

Hi Graham,

Still on the to-do list. Although a great success and rightly so, Raspis are still only a very small percentage of the world's computers and also fall below the minimum spec for most of our customer-requested applications. We literally cannot use them yet - at least, not properly.

After we develop our own custom web scraping and monitoring apps though (both trivially easy for any machine to do), that will change.

Volunteer computing can, and should, harness the surplus resources of every computer on the planet, so we will certainly get to the Raspis!

Cheers,

Mark

DR
David Reichert ID: 2839729 Posts: 1
14 Jun 2017 09:32 AM

How's this going?

Mark McA ID: 179 Posts: 224
15 Jun 2017 04:37 PM

Hi David,

Yes, this is done. We have various low-cpu tasks under the umbrella of a generic 'ce' label, can be easily performed by a Raspi. Turns out that connections are just as useful as CPUs.

Cheers,

Mark 

Graham Jenkins ID: 1626 Posts: 160
15 Jun 2017 08:54 PM

So .. we just install CE on a Pi, and it should automatically grab some appropriate projects?

Graham Jenkins ID: 1626 Posts: 160
18 Jun 2017 12:42 PM

Well .. it was a good theory. I did the installation on an Raspi B+ a couple of days ago, and it seems to know about the Rosetta project that's running on my x86_64 machines, but it hasn't actually done any work :(

Graham Jenkins ID: 1626 Posts: 160
21 Jun 2017 10:12 AM

Hey Mark .. are you receiving? How do I make my Raspi B+ grab some work that it can actually do?

Mark McA ID: 179 Posts: 224
21 Jun 2017 12:29 PM

Hi Graham,

Still looking into it! Confess this isn't something we have actually tried ourselves yet. Please stand by for an update... :)

Cheers,

Mark

Matt ID: 44 Posts: 292
21 Jun 2017 06:48 PM

The low-cpu tasks under the generic 'ce' label which Mark mentioned earlier are Windows-only (at the moment).  Devices that can't run that should get other tasks, though -- looks like in your case Rosetta.  Will look into why you're not getting work (*Could be on our end, could be at Rosetta's end).  

What OS are you running, and how much RAM and spare disk on the device?

Graham Jenkins ID: 1626 Posts: 160
21 Jun 2017 10:07 PM

It's the original 8GB "NOOBS" Raspbian edition with 512MB memory thus:

lsb_release -d => Debian GNU/Linux 7.5 (wheezy)

df -H / => Size:6.1G  Used:2.5G  Avail:3.3G  44%

free -o => total:447996 used:370860 free:77136 buffers:14724 cached: 172248

swapon -sk => Size:102396 Used:0

So I guess it shouldn't be trying to do Rosetta tasks! But it would be nice if it could do something useful ..

Matt ID: 44 Posts: 292
22 Jun 2017 03:00 PM

Rosetta may be requiring 1GB RAM -- though I think in actuality it uses < 400MB.  Will look into this, though it'll take till some time next week.  

(*It's possible your box is falling into a bit of a crack, applications-wise: we don't have a lot of Linux devices which also have less than 1GB RAM. But please stay tuned...)

MS
Marius Sittig ID: 7096988 Posts: 1
14 May 2021 04:34 PM

Any tasks for arm devices incoming soon? 

Matt ID: 44 Posts: 292
18 May 2021 09:35 PM

Hi Marius.  As you can tell, we don't officially support Ras Pi.  But this should work:

  1.  An ARM version of BOINC is available as a package for Raspbian; install it. 
  2.  Attach your BOINC client to Charity Engine (See step #2 here)
  3.  Take a look at this guide for advice on how to configure your system