While I was participating as a team member for element14 to help folding@home analyze coronavirus
I wanted to use my rPi4 to help with the effort. Unfortunately, folding@home does not support the ARM processor, mentioned by cstanton and ninjatrent. They support Windows, Linux, and Macintosh, but on the x86 CPU only. Doing all that works well, and I have my older x86 linux laptop doing some folding@home.
But I wanted to use my Pi 4, so I was looking at the BOINC site.
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/projects.php
With SETI@home shutdown, I didn't know if there was some other project I'd be interested in helping. I saw only a few that support the Pi, viewing their list, they have a symbol with a Linux penguin with ARM:
So great, the next thing I did, for a clean install, I checked the Raspbian menu, "Add/Remove Software" at the Preferences section, and searched for boinc, and there it was. It installed with no problem.
And now BOINC shows up in the Raspbian menu system, by default, at the SystemTools section.
Next step, choose one of the ARM compatible projects,using the BOINC manager, the interface has few buttons displayed, "Add Project" is one of them. In my case I selected einstein@home. This project analyzes radio telescope data, looking for pulsars (collapsed neutron stars).
The analysis started quickly, but I did want to manage how many resources BOINC used. I quickly realized I could use the "View . . . Advanced View" to set many options. The "Simple View" only displays the buttons you would use after you have everything set just right.
I want to use my Pi 4 as my internet browsing machine, so I set it to use 60% of my CPU as a guess. That setting has worked out well. Especially since the BOINC manager monitors the CPU and suspends its computing when the computer is busy. It acts "nice" as we would say in the Unix/Linux world. There are several other tabs (network bandwidth, disc space, schedule) but I left those alone.
The only thing left to do now was sign up with a user name. Go to einsteinathome.org and sign up.
And, cstanton suggested, that I created an element 14 team. So I did. Christopher, and element14 and Avnet, please let me know if naming it "element14" is ok to use, your offical name, or if I should use another name. As I write this, I'm a team of one, join in if you'd like.
Allen
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