Anybody else have any AppleTVs crunching for BOINC?
Just curious what projects work best, and how hot the CPU can be safely set.

I've seen discussions on this over time. There are a few issues. First and foremost, access to the operating system. It's my understanding that Apple TV is a fairly closed OS. You get the menu they give you and the choices they give you.

Second, the box is designed for hardware IO, and the processor for HD playback. I could be wrong, but I don't think it's a standard Intel x86 processor. I think it has SSE 1 through 4, but is otherwise fairly stripped down, like a Celeron.

Third, as you said, is heat.

So, the issue becomes, *if* you can get BOINC on it, how much return will you get at risk of burning out the processor? I think the fact that I've seen these threads appear and vanish means it's not very promising. Sorry.

Oh, I've been BOINCing on it for about a few days now.
It certainly isn't terribly fast, but even if it gets a hundred credits a day, that's better than just letting it sit there.

That would explain why some projects work on my Mac, but not my AppleTV (Like Rosetta)

Dang thing is always hot anyway. May as well give it a reason to be hot

The MacTV has a 1.0 GHz processor based on the Pentium M.

How are you running BOINC on it? Some flavor of Linux?

Oh! Based on Pentium M.
That explains why it wouldn't run MilkyWay optimized clients.
...i think

Over all, though, I'm still happy it's crunching when I'm not watching movies. Don't like wasting CPU time.

I'm agreeing with noderaser here... *How* did you get this to work? I'm assuming you're using the OSX client. I didn't think the Apple TV interface gave enough freedom to install software.

There's a project on Google Code called ATVUSB-Creator that allows you to install SSH on your AppleTV.
Once you've done that, just wget BOINC and away you go.

There's a helpful walkthrough somewhere online. It's a couple years old, but as long as you're familiar with UNIX, it isn't too difficult.

Ahh, sense is made....

I'm not a Unix geek, as I know Windows better, but my first OS was SunOS 3 (and then 4) at a command prompt. On my Linux or OSX boxes, I always feel more comfortable at a command shell. Once you have SSH on the ATV, then yeah, you'd have free reign.

Cool, thanks!

At one time I had a few of my first generation apple tv boxes running full os x 10.5 installs on the internal drive with the modified kernel and boot.efi to allow using it as a cheap os x unit, it was a fun little project.

At some point I decided to use them solely as distributed computing units, and installed boinc within the os, attached them to my Einstein@home account and set cpu use @ %100, and allowed boinc 50GB of disk use.

They didn't seem to run much more hot than when they were sitting there just running the native apple tv os, and I figured if they are sucking electricity, why not do something useful.

Here are some stats for one that stayed on nonstop for a while, it did a bit of work for a little media streaming device:

Name AppleTV-1.local
Created 22 Aug 2011 19:41:54 UTC
Total credit 30,394
Average credit 0.09
Cross project credit
CPU type GenuineIntel
Genuine Intel(R) processor 1.00GHz [x86 Family 6 Model 13 Stepping 8]
Number of processors 1
Coprocessors ---
Operating System Darwin
9.4.0
BOINC client version 6.12.33
Memory 256 MB
Cache 976.56 KB
Swap space 138799.57 MB
Total disk space 148.73 GB
Free Disk Space 135.3 GB
Measured floating point speed 486.83 million ops/sec
Measured integer speed 2175.6 million ops/sec
Average upload rate 82.15 KB/sec
Average download rate 1433.68 KB/sec
Average turnaround time 8.33 days
Maximum daily WU quota per CPU 30/day
Tasks 0
Number of times client has contacted server 400
Last time contacted server 14 Feb 2012 21:47:14 UTC
% of time BOINC client is running 98.0273 %
While BOINC running, % of time work is allowed 99.9846 %
Task duration correction factor 0.921874