mirror of https://github.com/BOINC/boinc.git
51 lines
1.6 KiB
HTML
51 lines
1.6 KiB
HTML
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<title>Which applications are suitable for BOINC?</title>
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<body bgcolor=ffffff>
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<h2>Which applications are suitable for BOINC?</h2>
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<p>
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BOINC is designed to support applications
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that have large computation requirements,
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storage requirements, or both.
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If a project can attract a million participants,
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it could gain access to dozens of TeraFLOPs of CPU power
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and perhaps a Petabyte of storage.
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<p>
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However, because the resources of a BOINC project are
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unreliable and sporadically-connected Internet PCs,
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an application must have several properties to effectively use BOINC:
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<dl>
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<dt>
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<b>Public appeal</b>
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<dd>
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An application must be viewed as interesting
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and worthwhile by the public in order to gain large numbers of participants.
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A project must have the resources and commitment to maintain this interest,
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typically by creating a compelling web site
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and by generating interesting graphics in the application.
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<dt>
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<b>Independent parallelism</b>
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<dd>
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The application must be divisible into parallel parts with
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few or no data dependencies.
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<dt>
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<b>Low data/compute ratio</b>
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<dd>
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Input and output data are sent through commercial Internet connections,
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which may be expensive and/or slow.
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As a rule of thumb,
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if your application produces or consumes more than
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a gigabyte of data per day of CPU time,
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then it may be cheaper to use in-house cluster computing.
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<dt>
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<b>Fault tolerance</b>
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<dd>
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A result returned from a public-resource computer
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cannot be assumed to be correct.
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Redundant computing can be used to reduce the error probability,
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but not all the way to zero.
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If your application relies on 100% correctness,
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you shouldn't use BOINC.
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</dl>
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