ARGOMENTO:

Come ben sapete Boinc spezzetta il lavoro in tante wus separate e NON interdipendenti e, per questo motivo, non è adatto a simulazioni simil-datacenter (in cui gli applicativi girano in parallelo).
Questo è sempre stato un cruccio per il buon Anderson, che vedeva in questo una forte limitazione all'intera infrastruttura Boinc.
Ebbene ieri, David Anderson ha lanciato il guanto di sfida, ovvero le Sporadic Applications , ovvero applicativi che girano IN PARALLELO su diversi pc distribuiti.
Così a naso la cosa sembra un delirio (come diavolo fa a discriminare hw diverso o OS diversi? Come fa a sapere se un nodo in quel momento è attivo o meno?), ma è giusto osare.
Il supporto lato client alla cosa sarà implementato a partire dalla versione 7.26 del boinc manager

Vediamo cosa ne nascerà

Un tentativo simile era stato fatto con il progetto VolpexUH
che poi era abortito

zioriga ha scritto:

Un tentativo simile era stato fatto con il progetto VolpexUH, che poi era abortito

Lo ricordo bene, ma era diverso.
Li avevano dovuto customizzare pesantemente il server e anche l'app che "simulava" il parallelismo
Qui si parla di lavorare direttamente sulla infrastruttura server/client per tutti i progetti che vogliano utilizzarla.

David doesn't elaborate much concerning the network. He talks about an app communicating with the guest server or other workers. One of the main tenets in BOINC is that the client always initiates the communication. This was intended to calm the fears about an unknown server (hacker) trying to communicate with the client. The user (client) might not know what other worker process the app is communicating with (my sporadic app is/or trying to communicate with boboviz's sporadic app) which seems to possibly conflict with someone's firewall rules etc. What happens to the state of the system when a power failure occurs? (app just told guest server it was available for compute but lost power, what does the guest server do?) The state would need to be saved across these types of incidents. Additionally, I think we all would agree that BOINC really doesn't do a very good job of resource management when running multiple projects with varying run times and resource needs. This seems like it would make it worse. If they are looking to make such a big change in the client, I would tend to make it release 8.0 instead of 7.26. But, I'm willing to be optimistic and will give it a try.

entity ha scritto:

But, I'm willing to be optimistic and will give it a try.

I agree with you. It's a BIG challenge.
HPC systems are based on reliability (both hw and sw)
Maybe a solution is to release very short wus (less than 5 minutes) to limit problems.
Another solution is to use well known logic ports (es 80/443) to comunicate with others sporadic apps
But, i repeat, it's a BIG challenge (for example, i prefear the project to create boinc apps ready for scientists)

Meantime, seems that the work to implement in 7.26 is started

I lavori su questa nuova parte di Boinc sembrano, comunque, procedere .

Il client 8 supporta appieno le sporadic app (che con l'ultima release 7 era implementato in maniera parziale)
Speriamo che qualche ricercatore/università/ecc si interessino a questa funzionalità

About 8 months ago, David was asked if he had spoken to anyone that might have an interest and he indicated that he had. I believe he said it was a machine learning application. He wasn't more specific than that.
The Discussion: github.com/BOINC/boinc/discussions/5387

entity ha scritto:

I believe he said it was a machine learning application. He wasn't more specific than that.

Here is more clear
Yes, examples are for ML, but do not exclude others kind of simulation