Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of AndroidBoinc

Timestamp:

Mar 16, 2012, 12:18:47 PM (13 years ago)

Author:

davea

Comment:

--

AndroidBoinc

@@ +1 @@
+= BOINC on Android =
+
+== History ==
+
+Jeff Eastlack (then of Freescale) has been working on getting SETI@home
+(and other scientific programs) to run fast on ARM processors since 2007.
+As of 2011 he had SETI@home doing about 1 GFLOPS on the latest Freescale processor.
+
+In 2008 a team led by Oded Ben-Dov ported SETI@home and a simplified BOINC client to Java on Android.
+This was a proof of concept but is not the right long-term approach,
+as Android is now able to run native-mode programs.
+
+At about the same time, Peter Hanappe from Sony Research wrote, in C++, a simplified BOINC client
+called BOINCLite, which is able to handle only 1 project attachment and 1 job at a time.
+We considered this as a basis for BOINC on Android but decided it was too limited.
+
+At the 2011 BOINC Workshop, Keith Uplinger, Peter Hanappe and Michael Tarantino
+experimented with Android and wrote up
+[wiki:WorkShop11/HackFest#BOINConAndroid instructions for building Android apps on Windows].
+
+In 2011, Carl Christensen and Peter Hanappe independently built the BOINC client
+(and the various libraries it uses) on Android.
+
+== Architecture ==
+
+As of now, the preferred architecture is based on the standard BOINC client,
+so that we can allow multiple attachments, multiple jobs running in parallel,
+and queued jobs.
+
+On !Win/Mac/Linux, the GUI and the client are separate processes that
+communicate over a TCP connection.
+However (as proposed by Peter Hanappe) for Android it's probably better
+to bundle them in the same program.
+The BOINC client would be included as a library,
+and would run in a separate thread.
+
+== What about the GUI? ==
+
+The current BOINC GUI (the Manager) is implemented using WxWidgets,
+for which no port to Android exists.
+Also, though the Manager's "simple view" is similar to what
+we might want on Android, it's not quite right.
+
+So the plan is to implement a new GUI, in Java, using the Android toolkit,
+which will communicate with the client using the existing GUI RPC mechanism.
+(Note: this mechanism currently uses a TCP connection, but it could be modified
+to use Unix pipes or some other IPC mechanism).
+
+Note: someone (I'm not sure who) has already implemented a BOINC GUI for Android:
+
+http://code.google.com/p/androboinc/
+
+This is intended to control BOINC clients running on remote hosts,
+but in principle it could control a local client.
+I haven't looked at it.
+
+== Project plan ==
+
+To be determined