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Rakarin
 
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2008-05-03 02:19:48

Hello all,

I've recently been thinking about the idea of getting an old refurbished Sun workstation, installing Solaris or OpenSolaris, and re-learning and expanding my old Solaris knowledge. Of course, I one of my first thoughts was, "I could run BOINC on that...". (Yeah, even my PS3 runs F@H.)

I was wondering, does anyone here run BOINC on RISC-type processors? I have a G5, and used to have a G4. What I'm asking about is something like a SPARC, one of HP's PA-RISC systems, an alpha processor, Tru64, or some such? What kind of integer and floating point measurements does BOINC's processor test give them?

Also, what about Opteron or Itanium? I've heard their processing leans more to integer than floating point, but I don't know if that's really the case.

Thank you.
PovAddict
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2008-05-03 22:44:53

Yes, there are projects supporting SPARC. SETI is one of them.
Not running BOINC anymore for several reasons...
Rakarin
 
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2008-05-04 23:05:36

Yes, there are projects supporting SPARC. SETI is one of them.


Thank you. Yes, SIMAP (both SIMAP and HMMR) and Einstein also have Solaris / SPARC apps. (All three of which I run.) SETI has apps for, well, *everything*. I'm sure even the people who ported NetBSD to a toaster have considered running SETI on it! ;-)

http://www.embeddedarm.com/software/arm-netbsd-toaster.php

Along those lines, I'm actually a bit surprised that the first BOINC project on the PS3 was *not* SETI.

What I was wondering, what kind of integer and floating point ratings do these processors get in BOINC's test? How quickly do they crunch work units?

Basically, should I pay bare minimum for an ancient refurbished Sun workstation to run the OS, and leave it off, or should I get something a little nicer and let it run BOINC? I know slower processors still get credit, but given that I pay for power for both the computer and air conditioning to cool it, I'd rather run something efficient.

Thank you.
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