I have some old beasts I'd like to pull out of mothballs this winter. It would be nice if I could successfully crunch a few BOINC workunits while heating up a back room in the house. If anyone has some tips on how to put these to use, I'd love some help. All have blank hard disks, so I figure Linux is the easiest way to go, although I do have some old installation media for AIX, Solaris, OS/2, etc. I think SETI is the only project left that might support any of these weird platforms.
IBM RS/6000 Model 7013
SGI Indy & O2
DEC Alphastation 500
Sun SparcStations IPC & IPX
Sony NEWS
Sun Fire V120
Apple Xserve G5 Cluster Node
Bonus points if you can help me get any of these to crunch a single WU for any project:
IBM PC RT
IBM PCjr
:)
The G5 should not be a problem at all, in fact we have a few G5 machines running Einstein@Home for testing here, including a Xserve G5 cluster node. Oh wait, not anymore since the power supply died at that one, but it was running well until ~ a year ago.
When I still had time for it I had E@H (GW only back then) running on Sun SPARC (Ultra 5 and Ultra 10) Solaris 2.6 and on a sgi Indigo2 10000 IRIX (6.5 IIRC). We were also running E@H on an old cluster of DEC Alphas running Linux (Woody at that time).
In general, if you can get a gcc 4 running, Unix-style platforms shouldn't be a problem at all. IIRC the (CPU) Radio-Pulsar search only requires FFTW, possibly gsl, and BOINC lib/API to be compiled, the source code is available from our license page, and as the BRP4 tasks are "small" enough for Android devices, they should work on these old machines, too.
I have an Alphaserver DS15 that I would like to get running E@H if possible. Unfortunately I'd prefer to run OpenVMS on it rather than Linux, so that probably kills off any chance of compiling apps for it.
I have an Alphaserver DS15 that I would like to get running E@H if possible. Unfortunately I'd prefer to run OpenVMS on it rather than Linux, so that probably kills off any chance of compiling apps for it.
Why?
I might be a bit of bootstrap work, and possibly require a some tweaks to the BOINC lib, but the core GNU tools (gcc, autotools) are available for OpenVMS as well (see e.g. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/faq/vmsfaq_020.html), so why not give it a try?
RE: I have some old beasts
)
The G5 should not be a problem at all, in fact we have a few G5 machines running Einstein@Home for testing here, including a Xserve G5 cluster node. Oh wait, not anymore since the power supply died at that one, but it was running well until ~ a year ago.
When I still had time for it I had E@H (GW only back then) running on Sun SPARC (Ultra 5 and Ultra 10) Solaris 2.6 and on a sgi Indigo2 10000 IRIX (6.5 IIRC). We were also running E@H on an old cluster of DEC Alphas running Linux (Woody at that time).
In general, if you can get a gcc 4 running, Unix-style platforms shouldn't be a problem at all. IIRC the (CPU) Radio-Pulsar search only requires FFTW, possibly gsl, and BOINC lib/API to be compiled, the source code is available from our license page, and as the BRP4 tasks are "small" enough for Android devices, they should work on these old machines, too.
BM
BM
I have an Alphaserver DS15
)
I have an Alphaserver DS15 that I would like to get running E@H if possible. Unfortunately I'd prefer to run OpenVMS on it rather than Linux, so that probably kills off any chance of compiling apps for it.
BOINC blog
RE: I have an Alphaserver
)
Why?
I might be a bit of bootstrap work, and possibly require a some tweaks to the BOINC lib, but the core GNU tools (gcc, autotools) are available for OpenVMS as well (see e.g. http://h71000.www7.hp.com/faq/vmsfaq_020.html), so why not give it a try?
BM
BM