BOINCing On The 'Phone

Recently, a disaster befell me during a PC upgrade, resulting in a tense few days awaiting an RMA decision over £150 worth of SODIMM RAM, a wasted £15 service charge to tell me what I already knew, and the consequent expenditure of close to £600 to build my eldest lad a new PC,

Sams new machine is now almost complete (just awaiting delivery of the graphics card - running on a terrible 128MB 'industrial' card at the moment!) and its AMD Ryzen 5 processor and DDR4 RAM make it a powerful and reasonably future proof machine.

Doing this however showed me just how old this machine that im currently editing this blog from, was getting! But, it works well enough for my purposes, except that I realised I could do with just a bit more power... so, for the sake of a tenner, Ive bulked up the RAM to the max the current CPU can handle (8GB of DDR3), and noticed a quite substantial improvement. But I realised that the motherboard is capable of handling much more processor than whats currently installed, an AMD Athlon 2.7GHz dual core. I now am awaiting delivery from Hong Kong of an AMD Phenom X4 2.5GHz quad core CPU. This should pep the machine up somewhat! Plus, it will mean I could up the RAM even more, as the Phenom can handle more than the Athlon, at least up to the motherboards max.

The failed machine that we replaced with the Ryzen 5 build, was an Acer 'All-in-one', which whilst it was a pretty top end workstation when purchased, was 3 years old, out of warranty, and otherwise really had nothing going for it! When it was first purchased, I had reservations, but kept them to myself! Foremost was - "what happens when it goes wrong/needs upgrading?" well, as we discovered, what happens is you kill it!

On paper, it was clearly upgradeable. In reality, Acer clearly had no intention of letting the customer have any control! We decided to bump the RAM up to 16GB of nice fast matched pair DDR4, which we knew the machine should be able to take.We put up with the rediculous difficulty of dismantling the machine - trying to unfasten the myriad of too short cables from the very heavy screen, removing the millions of screws, heat shields etc, and having to remove the entire main board to access the RAM sockets! (no RAM access panel on the back like a self respecting laptop!). We fitted the new RAM - and the machine promptly died! After much inspection, it was discovered that the spare slot in the RAM socket was deformed (clearly faulty from manufacture) and the SODIMM stick didnt seat correctly - shorting the pins and destroying the main board chipset! All this of course made irrelevant the fact that the numerous rebuild/dismantle cycles needed to investigate the fault led to the key cables being damaged beyond repair!

So the new RAM went back. This was the most anxious part as it had been bought as a gift by Sams grandad, at a very distressing and sad time for the family. I was very relieved when ebuyers techs reported it fine and the refund issued!

So me and Sam spec'd up a new machine, ordered the parts and built it! A little more on that later...

But clearly I doth digress!...

This post is meant to be about phones and BOINC, as per the title! Well, Im coming to it!

As a result of the failed machine, I now found I had a stick of SODIMM RAM spare, so decided to see if I could make use of it in any of my other machines. Now, somehow ive acquired several laptops, all of different ages and capabilities. It made sense to rationalise them. I looked at all the specs (ignoring the Dell Latitude 400 which is my DOS machine!!!) and the RAM, and decided which of the three would be the most capable, swapped RAM about to make it the best of them. This is now my main radio laptop. The next one down, ive yet to do anything with. But the worst of them, a very old Toshiba Equium dual core, still running windows vista, I decided to play with as clearly it was otherwise scrap, and you all should know by now I dont like to chuck useful kit out.

So I have that old Tosh machine crunching numbers as a semi-dedicated BOINC platform. Its still on vista, but I might move it over to a linux build at some point if that will improve the BOINC performance. It was while setting this up, and fixing a few issues with it, I started to wonder about what I could do with my old mobile phone...

My old mobile has been sat on my shack desk for absolutely ages. Its a Samsung Galaxy Ace 4. It was very unlikely to every get used again, and worth nothing to sell. But - it has a 1.2GHz quad core CPU and an Android OS! I had run BOINC on it before, briefly running Quakecatcher and SETI@home.

Recently though my BOINC choice has been medical research. Ive cut back on the SETI work units, and ended the space and encryption projects. Apart from a bit of involvement with Climateprediction (which was the first BOINC project I ever ran) my choices now are Rosetta and Worldcommunitygrid, where I am attached to immune system and cancer research projects. It occurred to me that I should be able to set up the phone as a dedicated cruncher!

So this is what I have done, although it needs a bit of work electronically! I now have both cores of this main machine and its GPU crunching numbers, the old Vista machine crunching, my current phone crunching (on all EIGHT cores!) and my old phone!