Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of GSoC_13

Timestamp:

Mar 26, 2013, 10:55:06 PM (12 years ago)

Author:

davea

Comment:

--

GSoC_13

@@ +1 @@
+= Google Summer of Code 2013 project ideas =
+
+== Enhance the BOINC Android GUI ==
+
+The current BOINC Android GUI is functional but not visually appealing,
+and it lacks some usability features.
+The project is to design and implement improvements to the GUI.
+Possibilities includes:
+
+ * Add graphics to the GUI; for example, allow projects to supply
+   slide-show images illustrating their science.
+ * Implement mechanism that allow users to smoothly navigate
+   from the GUI to web-based features on project sites,
+   as is done on the desktop BOINC GUI.
+ * Implement the "notices" mechanism that allows project to push
+   news items to volunteers.
+
+== Automated testing of BOINC ==
+
+We're in the process of deploying a Jenkins-based automated test system for BOINC.
+Help us add unit tests to the BOINC code,
+and to design end-to-end tests that exercise the entire system
+under a range of use cases and error conditions.
+
+== Job size matching ==
+
+Some BOINC projects now have applications with versions for GPUs, CPUs, and mobile devices.
+The speed of these devices varies by roughly 3 orders of magnitude;
+a job that takes 10 minutes to complete on a GPU might take a week to complete on a mobile device.
+This disparity is undesirable - we'd like all jobs to take roughly the same amount of time.
+To do this, we need a way to generate an appropriate distribution of jobs sizes,
+based on a dynamic resource pool,
+and we need a scheduling mechanisms that distributes jobs appropriately.
+Design and implement these.
+
+== Accelerating batch completion ==
+
+Volunteer computing resources are unreliable - computers fail,
+people uninstall BOINC, and so on.
+Roughly 5% of jobs fail or time out.
+This means that in a batch of 10,000 jobs, 500 or so will fail.
+We retry these (after a delay of a few days) and 25 or so will fail, and so on.
+Thus is can take quite a long time to finish the entire batch.
+
+This problem can be solved by using more reliable computers to handle retries
+and jobs at the end of a batch.
+Doing so, however, is tricky.
+Design and implement a mechanism for doing this.