Doing somethin useful in idle time

[honda4life]

Hi,

I have a raspberry pi in colocation, so it's always on.
Very useful to me, but quite a lot idle time, so that could be better.
I'm searching for some suggestions, how to get the most out of it.
I was thinking on a bitcoin miner, or something like that, but I guess it's not worth it.
Maybe there are better things to do?


Thanks you, when having a good idea.

[confuseling]

The obvious suggestions are

1) Torrents. Many free software projects are grateful for extra seeders - my Pi seeds Debian ISOs. Of course, when ISPs and such organisations with 'big iron' machines are hosting the files as well, it's debatable how useful adding more slow machines is. But it doesn't do any harm, particularly if you can seed smaller projects you are fond of.

2) Grid computing. If you can find a project through something like BOINC which runs on the ARMv6, they'll have chopped it up into very small work units (because ARMv6s are inherently slow). I've not heard of anything in BOINC officially which will run, though there are some unofficial builds out there. I wouldn't be surprised if projects start officially porting things - there are lots of Pis out there now.

[Heater]

Give me a login account:)

[Bikeman]

As for distributed computing with BOINC, one of the projects supporting ARMv6 on Linux (and therefore the Raspberry Pi) is Einstein@Home (I was involved in porting the code). The application that was ported to run on Raspis searches for radio pulsars (very interesting astrophysical objects that emit radio waves) in the data of the Arecibo radio telescope. This search has now succeeded to find almost 50 previously undiscovered pulsars. Finders will receive a certificate! The app was tuned for the Raspi to consume less memory (around 90 MB most of the time) than on other platforms where RAM is less of an issue.

The same search also runs on Android phones and tables, BTW.

For desktop PCs (with or without GPUs), Einstein@Home offers additional apps that search for

- pulsars emitting gamma-rays (in the data of the FERMI satellite),
- radio pulsars in data from the Australian Parkes radio telesecope
- gravitational waves (an effect predicted by General Relativity) in data of the LIGO experiments

Since all previous discoveries were made with desktop PCs/notebooks etc, you could be the first to discover a pulsar with a credit-card-size computer.

Go to http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu for more info.


Cheers
HBE

[confuseling]

Good stuff. I added Einstein@home and their experimental setup;

http://albert.phys.uwm.edu/

through boincmgr, both seem to work (oddly I've never been able to get boincmgr to connect to another host properly, so I just used ssh -X and ran it on the Pi).

Hmmm... nice warm Pi. Thanks.

[confuseling]

...(oddly I've never been able to get boincmgr to connect to another host properly, so I just used ssh -X and ran it on the Pi).

confuseling tries RingTFM, turns out it does work.

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Control ... C_remotely

[honda4life]

Okay, hosting the images of the raspberry pi seems one thing as long as I have storage enough.
But what's the benefit, I think there are quite a lot seeds of the images.

The pi isn't very fast, I know, the connectivity is the real deal

[Heater]

Well, I was only half joking when asking for a login account.

Every now and then I have compilations to do that can take over twenty hours on the Pi.
That means I don't get to use my Pi for anything else all day. Often things go wrong so that can be more than one day.
Being able to do these builds on Pis in the cloud (Pi in the Sky) would free up my local Pi for other fun and games.

Specifically I want to build propgcc. That is a version of GCC that generates code for the Propeller micro-controller from Parallax Inc.
Then there is the SimpleIde GUI development environment for the Propeller.
These things allow one to develop Propeller code on the Pi and load it to the Propeller.

So Raspi "build farms" in the cloud is not such a daft idea.

[honda4life]

I agree.

But I am responsible for the data that's being received or sent over the internet.
Setting up a VPN and doing very bad "anonymous" things on the internet... that's a big personal risk.

[confuseling]

Okay, hosting the images of the raspberry pi seems one thing as long as I have storage enough.
But what's the benefit, I think there are quite a lot seeds of the images.

The pi isn't very fast, I know, the connectivity is the real deal

If you're not heart-set on it being Pi software, there are thousands of ISOs you could host. Pick one of the more obscure projects or architectures, and I'm sure you'll find things with very few always-on seeders.

http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/

[robocoastie]

So I've tried the Burdeview steps by Daniel Carrion to install Boinc but I run into a problem when I try to untar anything:

pi@raspberrypi-1 /var/lib/boinc-client $ sudo tar xfz pogs-armv61.tar.gz
tar (child): pogs-armv61.tar.gz: Cannot open: No such file or directory
tar (child): Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: Child returned status 2
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
pi@raspberrypi-1 /var/lib/boinc-client $

the file is there.

Any ideas?

[confuseling]

Boinc is in the repo. Assuming that's Raspbian, just

Code: Select all

sudo aptitude install boinc

Then run boincmgr to set it up.

[robocoastie]

Yea, tried that. That method gets the no work for your architecture message. Ended up finding a seti version in repo but get same error. oh well.

Rob

[confuseling]

Maybe try adding Einstein@home - you can do it from the menu in boincmgr as far as I remember (sorry, killed my Pi temporarily so I can't check ), rather than having to enter a URL.

[robocoastie]

Gave Einstein@Home a whirl this afternoon and that worked like a charm. Seems the problem simply had to do with work-units for architecture perhaps.

Rob

http://sdrv.ms/1bbHVVq

[jbeale]

I have an otherwise-mostly-idle Pi running BOINC with the milkyway project (calculate trajectories of stars to determine origins in earlier satellite galaxies, etc). It seems to work, and has a quite small memory footprint ('top' says it is using only 1.1% of memory). It takes about 3 days to complete one work unit, and my desktop PC does the same in a few hours, but at least it is contributing in its own small way. use boinccmd --get_state to see what's going on at any time.

[robocoastie]

thanks for the info tips!

Rob

[wwinter86]

Unfortunately the only one I can get to work is Einstein@Home, but I would prefer to use a medical project like Folding@Home. Does anyone know of one that works on the Raspberry Pi?

[jamesismagic]

Any thought on the folding@home question? I have a cluster of 10 Pi 2 B's I hope to expand to about 30 by the end of the year and want to set them off doing that 24/7 or when I don't need to use them for other purposes. I'm hoping the quad core capabilities will make it more able for this.

Also, can they all be made work on a single work unit for f@h?

[davidcoton]

Any thought on the folding@home question? I have a cluster of 10 Pi 2 B's I hope to expand to about 30 by the end of the year and want to set them off doing that 24/7 or when I don't need to use them for other purposes. I'm hoping the quad core capabilities will make it more able for this.

Also, can they all be made work on a single work unit for f@h?

F@H mainstream does not run on ARM, AFAIK

It's possible that, if Chrome will run, then the NaCl version of F@H will run. Haven't heard of anyone trying it.

[jamesismagic]

Thank you for info. Annoying though, considered that my xperia Z2 has the folding@home app installed and is able to crunch the numbers, how efficiently who knows!

Perfect scenario: combine Pi's (and keep simply adding) to work on same problem for 'super power'. F@h/rosetta control panel a-la windows version, 24/7 folding.

I'm a total Pi noob by the way.

[davidcoton]

Look at the FAH forum for more on running on clusters. FAH won't at present, and isn't likely to -- the direction of travel is towards streaming small work packets and getting them back quick.

[redtiger]

Just started running theskynetpogs boinc project.

At the moment this is in beta but should soon be running on the main project.

My raspberrypi2 is running as anonymous platform using the binaries compiled by Daniel Carrion.

See this link http://pogsbeta.theskynet.org/pogsbeta/ ... id=162#162 for details.

[redtiger]

pogs.theskynet.org
boinc

The pogs project has now resumed having completed the beta testing.

For details of joining using a RaspberryPI go to this message board.