This post was published 3 years 4 months 2 days ago. Therefore, it is likely to be outdated and may no longer be valid.
Well, sort of.
Any regular readers of my blog will know that I bang-on about World Community Grid. It’s so simple to install and it only runs when your computer is powered on but idle; I don’t know why everyone doesn’t run it on their machine(s).
I’m also interested in all the statistics — there’s a hell of a lot of data crunching going on — and naturally, I’m interested in my WCG stats, predominantly my total run time, total accumulated points and current points ranking.
A week or so ago a ‘virtual’ light bulb appeared above my head. There’s no need to add physical devices to increase the amount of WCG data crunching I do; instead, add virtual devices to an existing machine.
I wanted to add a number of virtual machines so I chose a fairly high-spec machine that I’ve got. It happens to be a Windows box but you can do the same on an Intel-based Mac.
Parallels is a desktop virtualization solution that allows PC and Mac users the ability to create completely networked, fully portable, entirely independent virtual machines on a single physical machine.
So, here’s another reason to use WCG — use it to learn Linux, in a virtual environment.
That is, use Parallels to install a virtual Linux device and once it’s up-and-running install and run the WCG BOINC client for Linux. For users with zero or limited Linux knowledge this could be a good way to learn this freely available, open-source desktop or server operating system. For more experienced users it’s a good way to increase your WCG points.
I already have Parallels running on my Windows-based IBM ThinkCentre. It’s a reasonably high-spec machine but the real reason I chose it is because it has 4GB of RAM. Windows uses about 2GB so I have 2GB left over for virtual machines. To run only one virtual machine you certainly don’t need this much RAM (system requirements – Windows/Mac). In reality, 1GB (512MB for the host and 512MB for the virtual machine) should be ample.
I recommend using Ubuntu Linux and specifically the ubuntu-X.XX-alternate-i386.iso (where X.XX is the current stable release; at the time of posting it is ubuntu-7.04-alternate-i386.iso). I’ve always had success with the alternate ISO images (not the alternate CD or DVD) and I’ve had problems with the regular desktop and server ISO images when installing in a Parallels environment. So, I recommend using a mirror that has an alternate ISO image available.
For info about ISO images see Wikipedia or Ubuntu.
I going to add 6 virtual Linux machines to my ThinkCentre (2 are already up-and-running crunching WCG data) each with just under 400MB of RAM. That’s just over 2GB leaving just under 2GB for my Windows host system.
I may include some screen-shots and/or tutorials when I get to installing the last virtual machine. Check back soon.