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BOINC on PowerPC

NODEraser

NODEraser

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 21, 2008
35
5
Astoria, Oregon
Does anyone else still use BOINC on their PPC Mac? It's been years since I used PPC as a daily user, but I still have a 12" PowerBook G4 that I occasionally use for things (and also a G3 for Classic Mode once in a blue moon) and still crunch some BOINC work every now and then.

If you're still using PPC on a regular basis, I would encourage you to run BOINC to convince the project administrators that it's still worth maintaining their software! On other forums, I often run into the argument that it's not worth the energy anymore because it's a measly PPC, but I figured I would have a better reception here. I'm using it already, might as well have it do something useful in the background.

I noticed that PPC OS X has dropped off the listings over at WUprop. I've encountered a few issues running it on the G4; first, you'll have to manually attach it using the http server and not the https that BAM or others will input for you, since BOINC 6.12.35 doesn't support https. Once it was attached properly, I got tasks but one errored out and the other was turned in too late so none of my info got published. I'll probably try and run it for a while within the next week to get some good data uploaded; might get around to pulling out the G3 as well just for kicks.

As far as projects go, I noticed that Moo! Wrapper and SETI still support PowerPC; Enigma is supposed to but I was unable to get any work from it. Any other PPC BOINC users out there? What projects are you successfully crunching?
 
The big question, how many BOINC projects still support PPC? Looks like SETI is the only "real project" for it. (Moo! Wrapper is just a wrapper for distributed.net. Although I believe dnetc's RC5 is still PPC-compiled, so you should get work on Moo for now.)

Although - gotta be honest - it's not really worth the electricity cost to run these on PPC any more. Pretty much all projects are GPU-accelerated now, and see orders-of-magnitude improvements. Although dnetc does still offer a 680x0 port of their client! (Forever ago, I did a speed test on a bunch of systems I had, including running on a Macintosh SE, back when they had a Mac OS 7-compatible build. Yeah, it was ridiculous. Where then-modern Intel systems got in the tens-of-thousands of whatever (million keys per second?) the SE got single-digits.
 
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Naturally, they're not going to compare to modern machines in terms of power, but if you're already using them... Might as well have something useful happen in the background. I know there are still a few die-hards who use their machines every day, those are especially the people we need to recruit.
 
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5 years later, Moo! is still going strong on my 12" G4 PowerBook. Due to some nostalgia-related new interest in using my various PPC Macs and other hardware, I've been playing around with it a lot more. I've been doing things like installing MacPorts to get updated software packages, and I'll probably give Sorbet Leopard a try.

One issue I seem to have, is getting Moo! and any other project to attach properly to new hosts. The old PowerBook was still "attached" and pulls tasks without any issue. However, I'm trying to get an iMac G4 up to speed as well and for some reason the only project it will "attach" properly to is Cosmology. They certainly don't have any PPC support, but it's one of the default projects from my account manager. Even the old PowerBook won't attach to new projects; I installed the official certificates package from the BOINC website, but that doesn't appear to help.

For the specifics, I've got two G4s running 10.5.8 and BOINC 6.12.35. When attempting to attach, I get stuck in an infinite loop of the following:

Fetching scheduler list
Project communication failed: attempting access to reference site
Internet access OK - project servers may be temporarily down

I know there are at least some other PowerPC BOINC users out there, hopefully somebody can shed some light on the situation. I'm not concerned about the "efficiency" of running BOINC on old hardware, I just want to do it because I'm playing with them anyway and could use some supplemental heat along the way.
 
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NODEraser said:
5 years later, Moo! is still going strong on my 12" G4 PowerBook. Due to some nostalgia-related new interest in using my various PPC Macs and other hardware, I've been playing around with it a lot more. I've been doing things like installing MacPorts to get updated software packages, and I'll probably give Sorbet Leopard a try.

One issue I seem to have, is getting Moo! and any other project to attach properly to new hosts. The old PowerBook was still "attached" and pulls tasks without any issue. However, I'm trying to get an iMac G4 up to speed as well and for some reason the only project it will "attach" properly to is Cosmology. They certainly don't have any PPC support, but it's one of the default projects from my account manager. Even the old PowerBook won't attach to new projects; I installed the official certificates package from the BOINC website, but that doesn't appear to help.

For the specifics, I've got two G4s running 10.5.8 and BOINC 6.12.35. When attempting to attach, I get stuck in an infinite loop of the following:

Fetching scheduler list
Project communication failed: attempting access to reference site
Internet access OK - project servers may be temporarily down

I know there are at least some other PowerPC BOINC users out there, hopefully somebody can shed some light on the situation. I'm not concerned about the "efficiency" of running BOINC on old hardware, I just want to do it because I'm playing with them anyway and could use some supplemental heat along the way.
Click to expand...

A couple of years ago, I tried setting up BOINC on my Power Mac G5 and my iBook G3, to see what projects out there might send chunks to my ancient gear to plod through. I was able to get the then-latest version of BOINC (to run on PPC Macs) started. Even after leaving them running for weeks on the scant few projects for which my PowerPC systems were eligible (I no longer remember what, but I distinctly remember the folding@home project was a hard nope), nothing got sent down for crunching.
 
ervus said:
Distributed.net finished OGR28 last year:
Click to expand...
Moo! is working on RC5-72 which is ongoing, Yoyo was working on OGR.

My trusty PowerBook G4 has been attached to Moo! since 2014, and still gets tasks to this day:
https://moowrap.net/show_host_detail.php?hostid=25614

However, I can't add any new projects to it, and other hosts will only completely "attach" to Cosmology, for which there is no PPC work. So, whatever Cosmology is doing server-side or with certificates (it reports as HTTPS, where Moo is not) may be where the issue lies.
 
I copied the files over from the Mac that worked (had to change permissions to get it to copy over right) and voila, the other one is now happily crunching away. I'll have to run some tests, but I'm sure there are a few key files that could be copied over versus everything.

I'm talking about the Library/Application Support/BOINC Data directory. I know I can skip the slots directory, but what are the key files that are needed to get the project going--that aren't being downloaded?
 
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