This post was published 4 years 8 months 28 days ago. Therefore, it may well be out of date. Do not reply on the contents of this post being accurate. 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.