Creating a BOINC project

From Asia at Home

Contents 1 Prerequisites 2 Set up a project 3 Add an application 4 Create a workunit 5 Install a validator 6 Install an assimilator 7 Install a work generator 8 Set up message boards 9 Monitoring 10 Hands on 11 Additional/optional

Prerequisites

• Server options:
  • Installing on Linux
  • Using the server VM
  • Using the cloud VM

• Installing on linux:
  • Prequisites:
  • http://boinc.berkeley.edu/trac/wiki/SoftwarePrereqsUnix
  • svn co http://boinc.berkeley.edu/svn/branches/server_stable
  • Correct file permissions (httpd needs project/$NAME/html/)
• Base URL for this tutorial: http://as-volte.twgrid.org
• Additional binaries and templates for the tutorial are here: File:Samples.zip Extract this zip file to your home directory if you want to follow the tutorial on your own computer.

Set up a project

• ./make_project tutorial
• Follow instructions in ~/projects/tutorial/tutorial.readme for httpd.conf and crontab
  • Copy tutorial.http.conf to /etc/httpd/conf.d and restart apache
  • crontab -e to add the cron task entries
• Visit the project website, server status page
• Explore the project database: http://as-volte.twgrid.org/phpmyadmin
• Explore project dir tree
• Explore config.xml, enable <one_result_per_user_per_wu>
• Start project
  • cd ~/projects/tutorial && bin/start
  • Participants to attach clients

Add an application

• We use upperCASE, the BOINC example application
• Edit project.xml if necessary
• Run bin/xadd
• Check website
• Create dir tree
• Copy apps from ~/samples/apps
  • Create a directory uppercase in ~/projects/tutorial/apps
  • Create a directory in uppercase for each platform you support. Use as directory names the names of the binaries in ~/samples/apps
  • Copy binaries from ~/samples/apps to the correct sub-directory
• Run bin/update_versions
  • Ignore the security warning AS THIS IS ONLY A TUTORIAL PROJECT:
• Check website

Create a workunit

• Copy templates from ~/samples/templates to ~/projects/tutorial/templates
• Explore templates
• Create an input file in
• cp in `bin/dir_hier_path in`
• Create a few workunits
  • ~/boinc/tools/create_work --appname uppercase --wu_template templates/uc_wu --result_template templates/uc_result --wu_name test_wuXY in
• Check admin webpage

Install a validator

• cp ~/boinc/sched/sample_bitwise_validator ~/projects/tutorial/bin/ (if necessary)
• Add <daemon> to config.xml (see ~/samples/conf/validator.conf)
• Check server status page
• Run bin/start
• Check server status page
• Check admin webpage

Install an assimilator

• cp ~/boinc/sched/sample_assimilator ~/projects/tutorial/bin/ (if necessary)
• Add <daemon> to config.xml (see ~/samples/conf/assimilator.conf)
• bin/start
• Check admin webpage
• Check results

Install a work generator

• cp ~/boinc/sched/sample_work_generator ~/projects/tutorial/bin/ (if necessary)
• Add <daemon> to config.xml (see ~/samples/conf/generator.conf)
• bin/start

Set up message boards

• Check message boards
• Edit create_forums.php
• Check message boards

Monitoring

• Log files
• Admin webpage
• DB
• bin/show_shmem

Hands on

• Participants to submit jobs and monitor server
  • Log files: ~/projects/tutorial/log_as-volte
  • Admin web pages: http://as-volte.twgrid.org/tutorial_ops
  • DB: http://as-volte.twgrid.org/phpmyadmin

Additional/optional

• Submit single jobs using the wrapper approach
• Enable db_dump