Boinc - to help science

[boboviz]

A lot of Boinc projects, now, support android on arm for their simulations (astronomy, physics, biology/medicine, etc).
I'm planning to buy a couple of P64, but i'm scared about temperatures.
No one is using fan?

[MichaelMeissner]

Ummm, the majority of pine64's haven't shipped yet. Only a few developers, and perhaps the first tier of people in the kickstarter campaign have gotten boards.

I'm sure when it gets to be in wider use, there will be more reports to say whether fans and/or heatsinks are needed.

[pine.tree]

I use heatsinks on mine, but a fan really shouldn't be neccesary. The heatsinks barely get warm during use, streaming 1440p video from Youtube.

It all depends on what you're using your Pine64 for. I'm not familiar with Boinc projects, so i don't know how strenuous it is for the board, but to be safe i got some heatsinks on eBay for $3 shipped. There shouldn't be too much of an issue without heatsinks, and with heatsinks there won't be any issue unless you're running benchmarks or number-crunching. Hope this helps!

[Andrew2]

a fan really shouldn't be neccesary. The heatsinks barely get warm during use, streaming 1440p video from Youtube.

When you watch videos in Android then this is done HW accelerated and the Pine64's temperature just increases by a few degree. He's talking about quite the opposite and he will need annoying fans for sure unless he does it correctly and uses one large fan with controlled airflow: http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=389&page=4

[pine.tree]

Thanks for the insight- i'm guessing Boinc is very resource-intensive?

[Andrew2]

I'm guessing Boinc is very resource-intensive?

Sure, on Pine64 and on any other ARMv8 board it's important compile the programs since some algorithms are 20 times slower when not being compiled for ARMv8:

Code:

   export CXXFLAGS="-O3 -march=armv8-a -mtune=cortex-a53"
   export CFLAGS="-O3 -march=armv8-a -mtune=cortex-a53"

Then the board gets as hot as with optimised settings but is still slow as hell. Have a look at the commonly used sysbench: http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=136&t=19158

[boboviz]

Thanks for the insight- i'm guessing Boinc is very resource-intensive?

Yes. But you can configure the use of cores, for example using only 2 core of 4.

[LMHansen]

Setting up a couple of boards for boinc would be cool ...

[kermitas]

Can somebody pleeeeease post Pine's CPU benchmark made by BOINC app? (boincmgr -> advanced -> Run CPU benchmarks and then advanced -> event log)

Can't wait to see how many whetstones and dhrystones there are .
Thanks!

[Keex]

Can somebody pleeeeease post Pine's CPU benchmark made by BOINC app? (boincmgr -> advanced -> Run CPU benchmarks and then advanced -> event log)

Can't wait to see how many whetstones and dhrystones there are .
Thanks!

Did it:
#1st run:
Benchmark results:
Number of CPUs: 4
1013 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
3583 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU

#2nd run:
Benchmark results:
Number of CPUs: 4
1015 floating point MIPS (Whetstone) per CPU
3593 integer MIPS (Dhrystone) per CPU

Ran it on Ubuntu using the 2GB Pine64+. Most surprisingly I got to use a program in Linux that just installed and had a user-friendly GUI that just worked without messing with config files. I'm shocked.

Cheers.