Let us revive this practice...

To submit questions for next week just click on the comments link below and submit your question.

Thanks in advance.

----- Rom

:)

BOINC now has a fork.

I guess this means we are now a successful open source project. I was told about it a couple of weeks ago.

I hope they go the whole way though, huck out the BOINC Manager and start with something fresh.  Take the client into the multi-threaded realm. 

I wish them the best of luck.

----- Rom

Website:

Synecdoche

I've been giving some thought recently to overhauling the BOINC Manager user interface.

The original GUI was a carry over from an MFC based version of BOINC Manager that was created even before I was hired on as an employee.  The original didn't even have the buttons off on the left hand side, the user would have to have guessed that they could right-click on something to bring up a context menu.

So, here we are four years latter and we are talking about adding more tabs to an interface that is already overly complicated.

My goals were as follows:

• Combine the simple and advanced GUIs.
• Reduce information overload. (The less information somebody sees right off the bat the less they have to parse)
• Use icon based buttons instead of words to describe actions. (Reduces required screen space and simplifies localization)
• Use icons people are going to recognize. (VCR/DVD Player/CD Player/iPod)
• Provide a way to drill down into the complicated information. (My grandmother wouldn't ever need to worry about resetting short term and long term debts for instance)
• Include context sensitive help in the interface.

Disclaimers:

• I haven't thought through the multi-host scenarios yet.
• The graphics were generated in MS Paint, these would not be used in the actual manager should we ever implement this.
• This might not go anywhere, David wasn't to keen on the idea.  He wants to get a formal usability study of a few prototypes before investing in a new user interface.
• This by no means should be thought of as a comprehensive specification, I think of this as a scratch pad.

If there is interest in the community to see something more formal I will go ahead and spec it out and submit it for review.

Initial Install

After a clean install, the client area should display a quick blurb that BOINC in and of itself is just a task execution engine and needs to be attached to a project/account manager before it can actually process work. 

At the bottom of the blurb should be an attach to project and attach to account manager link.

Working User Interface

Clicking on would bring up a dialog specific to each section. 

In the mock-up on the right hand side the 'News' section would disappear unless there are new news items.  The news section is supposed to be a summary roll-up of various RSS feeds for each of the projects.  It would also contain messages generated in the messages area for things like disk space warnings and the like.  Another possible use for it would be the number of new messages for a thread you are watching in a projects forums.

Active Tasks, when expanded, would list the active tasks on the system in the format:

<Project Name>:<Task Name>:<Percent Complete>:Suspend:Resume:Abort

Active Transfers, when expanded, would list the active transfers on the system in the format:

<Project Name>:<Transfer Name>:<Percent Complete>:Suspend:Resume:Abort

Both <Task Name> and <Transfer Name> would be truncated and an ellipse (...) added in the case where the names are to long for the display area.

Projects, when expanded, would list the projects the client is attached too.

Each project, when expanded, would have a section for the following areas:

• Tasks
• Transfers
• Messages
• Statistics
• Resource Usage

The main window should have a vertical scroll bar for when everything is expanded, but it should not have a horizontal scroll bar.

----- Rom

[Update 28/08/2008 9:37am]Apologies to Michael Tughan, while I can't recall seeing his designs for a Mac specific GUI it doesn't mean I didn't. I don't know how much overlap there is, but I thought I had drawn my inspiration from a combination of Outlook 98, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger.

See the announcement here:
http://blog.schreiter.info/index.php/boincpe-goes-public/

If I ever get around to rebuilding a couple of crunching machines, I'll be using this package.

----- Rom

What are you most chuffed about getting fixed/working/added?

 To be honest most of my contribution to this release has been in the manager role, most of the code changes were from David and 3rd party contributors.

I guess the thing I'm most jazzed about in the release of this new client that I pushed for would be the CPU feature detection stuff the community has been wanting for a long time. Along with that the client makes an attempt to detect which video card the machine is using.

It has been a 'chicken and the egg' problem, it wasn't something any of the projects were specifically looking for and therefore kept being dropped from the list. Of course the major problem with that is we didn't have any firm numbers on what percentage of the base of machines could handle the more advanced instruction sets.

Now that the information is part of the host record, I'm hoping the stat sites can build some fancy graphics and charts which might encourage one or more of the projects to create a client with specialized instruction sets.

We'll need to improve the server-side scheduler to handle scheduling specialized clients, but in the end I think it'll benefit everyone. Undoubtedly this is going to cause some angst amongst those who are only in it for the credits, as the credit granting gap between a stock client and an optimized client is going to shrink further.

How is boinc going to get around the problem on Windows VISTA where you are not suppose to (and often cannot) write to the 'program files' directory?

We'll be breaking apart the data from the executables using the SHGetFolderPath API. Although we'll need to put a possible override registry value for those who want to store the data on a different drive.

Right now I've been brainstorming on the various upgrade scenario's. ( XP to Vista and  32-bit to 64-bit )

It is a messy problem.

To submit questions for next week just click on the comments link below and submit your question.

Thanks in advance.

----- Rom

From this article:
http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/85807/from/rss09

What the heck, it is bad enough I have to allocate as many resources as I have to avoid being inundated with spam in both email (6000+ a month) and blog (2500+ a month), but now something I've helped to build is being abused.

I guess the criminal element of the world just is not content with crapping in their yard, they have to crap in everyone else's too, even when there isn't any money involved.

I had heard about this early last week, Carl came up with a clever solution for CPDN. Hopefully this won't be all that common.

----- Rom

Matt B. informed me that GridRepublic has been named a finalist for the Web Awards at the SXSW Interactive Festival. This will be some great PR for BOINC and BOINC based projects.

For further details on how to help out you can go to these websites:

http://gridrepublic.org/

https://secure.sxsw.com/peoples_choice/

Apparently you can vote once per day through March 2nd.

Good Luck to GridRepublic!!!!!!

----- Rom

We just released 5.8.x, so I’m sure there are a lot of questions out there.

Ask away...

----- Rom

Have you seen this GPU programming kit:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_37226.html
What do you think are the difficulties of GPU programming with this and would some work still need to be done by the CPU like on F@H?

I suspect every project would have to be a hybrid and use both the CPU and GPU. At the end of the day the OS needs to know what is going on, otherwise it would just overwrite whatever work you assigned to the GPU with something else.

To be honest, I haven't studied the S@H or R@H source closely enough to know how easy or hard it would be to port using the various toolkits released by the video card manufacturers.

Hopefully we'll start to see more traction in this area with the release of 5.8, since it has some basic video card detection code in it.

----- Rom

BOINC 5.8 has now ready for public release.

Some of the highlights for this release include:

• Simple GUI (Complements of World Community Grid)
• Basic CPU identification
• CPU throttling
• New CPU scheduler
• New work fetch policy
• Improved memory management

We have one outstanding issue with the Linux client at this time. As soon as we have resolved it we'll release it as well.

We would like to thank everyone for their hard work in making this a solid release.

----- Rom