Deploying a BOINC server on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud

Why use a Cloud?

Hosting a BOINC server on a cloud is useful for the following reasons:

• It's cheaper for small to medium projects to rent time on a cloud versus paying for hardware, bandwidth, and electric power on one's own.
• It's easier and faster to use an existing OS image with the BOINC server already installed than to compile and configure it on one's own.

Quick Start

This assumes that you already have an account with Amazon's EC2 and S3. If not, here are some ​instructions. It also assumes you have Amazon's AMI tools installed. If not, here are ​instructions.

1. Download the server bundle.

2. Assuming you've extracted the archive to /tmp, upload the bundle to Amazon's S3:

ec2-upload-bundle -b boinc-debian-etch -m /tmp/boinc-debian-etch.manifest.xml -a $ACCESS_KEY -s $SECRET_KEY

where $ACCESS_KEY and $SECRET_KEY are your environment variables set to the corresponding keys.

3. Register the uploaded image:

ec2-register boinc-debian-etch/boinc-debian-etch.manifest.xml

This should output an Amazon instance id (ami-XXX).

4. Start an instance of the boinc server:

ec2-run-instances ami-XXX

And voila, assuming you've opened port 80, you should now have a running BOINC server.