Thursday, December 3, 2009

BOINC Portable Beta



The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a system that allows users to volunteer CPU time to various projects. The idle CPU time is used to help discover new drugs, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, solve mathematical problems, predict climate changes etc.

Normally you install BOINC on your computer and then subscribe to different projects. Now you can run it from your USB flash stick or from your desktop without the need for an installation.

This is a beta version and I release it hopping to get some feedback.

You should be aware of the following problems:
  1. If you download a job on an Intel CPU and then continue running it on an AMD CPU (or perhaps on a different Intel CPU too) it might corrupt the results so try not to do this.
  2. Because of the limited space on flash drives some projects might reject you.

It would be a good idea to attach to a project and then edit the local preferences to make it write to the disk every ten minutes or even more and also not download data for many days ahead. Finally it would be better to use it more like an install-less version rather than a portable one.

Download BOINC Portable Beta from here and please leave comments!

PS: After I made my portable version I found another portable version made by another guy here.

PS2: You can find the source code for the launcher in the Data directory. It's an AutoIt3 script. Feel free to do whatever you like with it.

PS3: I forgot to add this to the readme:
You can find the source code for BOINC here.

PS4: I tested the other guy's portable version and it lack some features compared to my own. For example it doesn't seem to save the registry settings of BOINC Manager.

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