So, the Desktop was crunching 24/7 mainly on Rosetta@Home and vacations in foreign countries were not able this summer, what else can we do? Why not building a Cluster which runs BOINC?
Nowadays deployment, scaling and maintenance is fully automated in modern Applications. Software is distributed within standarized containers. If your company does not run an onprimse cloud solution, applications and services might be outsourced to Amazon, Google or Azure. Some of the Applications I have do deal with from 9 to 5 in my business life are multinode installations and may be categorized as a cluster. But are these real clusters? They are not because their design its not really reasonable to run them on a Cloud platform.
But BIONC? Pretty straight forward standarized application on Linux / commandlinde environments. More or less stateless since there is only the current task which needs to done. New workunits can be fetched anytime.
Manual installation and also updateing each Cluster node might be exhausting. Why not trying to containerize the boinc client and run it on a Kubernetes cluster?
The latest Raspberry PI4 Models come along with 4 Core ARM CPU. They might not be the fastest CPU but they are affordable and absolutely reasonable for a home cluster project.
Let’s give that a try.
