Cell Phones For Science: BOINC Now Available For Android 70
Luyseyal writes "BOINC is now available on Android. Many of you may not know, but the Slashdot Users team makes a decent showing on World Community Grid. WCG supports research on AIDS, schistoma, cancer, clean energy, and more. Now is your chance to put your idle charge cycles to good use. Let's do some science!"
Battery (Score:3, Insightful)
Like I'm not already fighting to keep my battery last a day? :(
Re:Battery (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Battery (Score:5, Insightful)
It will burn a hole in your table though.
Ever noticed how hot smartphones get when left running at full capacity for a while?
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Actually, another nice thing about Android clients is that they suspend at certain CPU temperatures. The official android client suspends at 40 C
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My phone overheats using Boinc as well. Given that lithium-ion performance is directly tied to the max temperature ever reached by the battery, this does concern me. Well, it would, except work paid for the phone and I have a feeling that if the battery goes out that they'll just pitch me a new phone rather than a new battery. Convenient!
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This is especially true on the A15-based smartphones and the "octacore". Truth is, they hit their max temperature (around 125C) after a few minutes if you peg all 4 high-powered (A15) cores in around 5 minutes.
From an analysis I saw, the software had to modulate at that point two of the cores to be around 50% utilization (so 2 going 100%, the other 2 at 50%) in order to maintain 125C
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Note to self: Design and market a bigass copper heatsink for mobile phones.
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Better idea, a Qi charger over a running-water tank.
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i know my phone runs off battery even when plugged in.. when low, and plugged in to extend a call... it still runs out of juice.. just takes longer... the charge rate is slower than the power consumption of the device.
such a stupid fucking idea.. perfect example of: just because you can (do something) doesn't mean you should.
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And the other thing is that if PCs start getting less popular (phone + KVM + RDP to the cloud or similar), BOINC will shrink. They're trying to cover their bets with this phone stuff. While I, the submitter, think it's cool and important, I seriously doubt people will want to spend much effort on it -- especially if PC ownership shrinks overall.
Also, you're talking about AIDS and other high profile projects. There are plenty of low profile, tiny projects that benefit a great deal from BOINC at a price point
Re:Battery (Score:4, Informative)
out of the box configuration is to not do calculations on battery... but I know we have 20k more battery comments coming.
Also, it is also set up out of the box so that if the battery gets below 90% it doesn't do calculations at any time. This allow the battery to charge up properly on most devices. Having said that, there are a lot of devices (like the Nexus 7 with four cores) that have problems because the battery drains *EVEN IF* it is on the battery. I have to set mine so that it only uses 2 cores otherwise the thing never charges.
Re:Battery (Score:5, Interesting)
aw.. crap... ...redo
Having said that, there are a lot of devices (like the Nexus 7 with four cores) that have problems because the battery drains *EVEN IF* it is on the charger. I have to set mine so that it only uses 2 cores otherwise the thing never charges.
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I suspect you need a higher-amperage charger, and not one marked higher amperage but made for iThings. If you do have an Apple charger, you need a special "charging" cable for most Android devices, though I think there is a hack to force some into high-current mode without such a beast.
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I actually have a solar-based charging system and charge off of a 12v storage battery, so this isn't really relevant for me.
Boinc is the lower priority for me, really, so if I had to I would get rid of it.
However, for most people your advice is straight on right.
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The phone communicates with the charger - if the phone can't do it, it'll max the charging at 500mA. My phone charges at a different rate when connected to different chargers. I'm sure you already know this, but just in case...
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My Galaxy S4 loses power while on a computer USB port but charges correctly on a wall wart. I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation but haven't bothered to look into it seeing as how I'm full to the brim with warts of various sizes and colors.
NARF,
-l
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Yeah, that makes sense. I just wondered if I had a buggy phone or too much crap running. I did put it into developer mode and kill just about everything on a regular basis. My last phone was a Nokia E75 so all this USB charging is new to me.
-l
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Also: Photoshop.
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The primary (theoretical) benefit wouldn't be for servicing the needs of the OS, but for providing more performance for demanding applications.
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still stupid (Score:2)
silly to risk doing anything to battery on phone when most of have multiple computers at home including a workstation with multiple cores. project wants to borrow my kid's plastic beach sand shovel when I have a bulldozer or three around the house.
The Idle Cycles Fallacy (Score:5, Informative)
This point gives me a chance to bring up the fallacy of "idle cycles" on modern processors.
There's no such thing any more. There was in the '90s and earlier when CPUs didn't have the power controls they do today, but nowadays your CPU uses exactly what it needs and anything more you give it to do will use extra energy.
So be aware that you're not putting any wasted resource to good use with these things. You're just using more resources. And on a phone that's the last thing you need.
Re:The Idle Cycles Fallacy (Score:4, Informative)
Indeed, idle cycles nowadays simply refers to your phone doing all of jack and shit while it's plugged in and recharging all night... apart from checking your email, SMS's, waiting for that phone call, etc.
It does NOT refer to wasted energy cycles as it did in the past. Yes, it absolutely uses more power than it would if you were just charging (or better, you turned it off completely and charged it then).
It is an act of donating a few bucks a year to scientific research.
-l
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Not to bust anyone's bubbles but I think that just donating the money instead of thinking you're a swell guy for letting them use your hardware would be a better gesture.
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Or both? :)
If it was not worth it to the scientists, BOINC would not exist beyond a curiousity. Instead, many corporations and individuals have donated time and money to make the supercomputer of the people possible.
-l
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Not necessarily. A lot of these smaller research teams would have to pay big bucks to get on a decent grid (within a reasonable research timeframe). BOINC affords them that with very little cost.
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/VolunteerComputing [berkeley.edu]
Why is volunteer computing important?
It's important for several reasons:
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You're confusing/intermixing two different technologies, which is understandable given their roles: CPU clock throttling (which is the dynamic adjustment of clock frequency based on CPU load, ex. Intel SpeedStep or AMD's Cool'n'Quiet), and halting a CPU core or processor when there's nothing more for it to do (usually via the x86 HLT instruction).
Clock frequency adjustments affect the entire CPU (meaning all cores) and is hard to explain exactly. It doesn't happen when "all cores are unused/idle", but has
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By default, it only works when it's plugged in, as pointed out ad nauseum here.
-l
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Einstien@Home reports the same thing on my old Droid.
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Yeah this is pretty much par for the course: BOINC runs on just about everything, but individual BOINC applications authors generally won't bother to implement any code for anything other than the top dominant mixes of arch/OS. So if you have yourself a nice giant cluster of old G4s running linux, good luck putting it to use for something other than a very obscure but easily-implemented mathematical constant hunt.
NativeBOINC (Score:3, Insightful)
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I use NativeBOINC for my android devices that don't have batteries... it is actually a much better client than the new official client, but it has more problems with batteries.
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That's pretty neat! Mod parent up. Einstein@Home and SETI@Home here.
I just installed it on my phone (Tegra 3) and will be putting it on my tablet (Tegra 2) later, so I'll see how it goes.
PrimeCoin (Score:1)
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This is something I think I need to try. Does it use CPUs well, or is this another GPU usage thing...
How about (Score:1)
Why not tie this sort of crowd sourcing to Bitcoin or the equivalent, where in the work (blocks) being done for the Bitcoin are actual research blocks.
Not sure if it's technically possible, but it would be interesting.
When BOINC Drive Out the Bugs... (Score:1)
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I've never had BOINC crash Windows. Were you using the GPU? Nvidia or AMD?
-l
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...that cause every Windows system to crash and have to be powered-off to resume...I'll consider putting it on my phone!
--CAO
That was my concern also, and was the reason I very reluctantly stopped contributing to SETI when they switched to BOINC. Every once in awhile they plead with me to rejoin, and every time I say "still using BOINC? Then no." Once bitten, etc etc.
On my phone? Freaking kidding me. The phone is unstable enough as it is.
WCG (Score:2)
If we had clean-as-in-free energy or I had a better income then I'd still be crunching for WCG. I stopped because I couldn't afford the extra 150W it caused my system to draw 24/7. I don't have a cellphone now because of the monthly cost, so they can't get my contribution that way either.
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Been there and don't sweat it. Thank you for the time you were able to contribute.
-l
Pauses until 90 percent charged (Score:2)
Gladly. (Score:1)
Gladly... how much am I going to get paid?
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Nothing. It's a donation. If you don't want to donate, it's your choice. :)
-l
Anybody got benchmarks? (Score:2)
I'd be very interested to hear how the performance on a variety of smartphones compares to Intel/AMD CPUs.
Anybody got some benchmarks to share?
Bill Watterson reference? (Score:2)