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Are there any client-server frameworks similar to SETI available ?

I have such client-server model, where volunteers sign up as client (agent or node, call it whatever) and give their idle computing resources.

So I will need to write a framework to distribute and track the work-units (or jobs) given to agents.

Is there any such FW available which i could go for. Then I save time to write the job processing logic etc.

Further, I hope the framework will also support the OS compatibility issues, agent binaries updates etc.

Pl. give any other suggestions in general on such distributed computing project you think I should investigate.

skaffman
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Munish Goyal
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1 Answers1

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Look at BOINC, which is a general framework for handling SETI style stuff.

Edit to expand: in fact, iirc BOINC is a spinoff of SETI. It'll probably handle all of your requirements.

Tim Barrass
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    And this old question looks a great place to start: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1888411/any-experience-programming-for-boinc/1950977#1950977 – Rup Jan 06 '11 at 11:38
  • So I have server in .NET . So can i write client in .NET and later may be in java (for linux and mac) ? Can it be used for commerical apps. – Munish Goyal Jan 06 '11 at 11:41
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    It's LGPL, which means (roughly) you're free to do whatever you want with it, provided you're willing to release the BOINC source-code you're using and any modifications you make to it, to anyone you give your compute client to. You're not required to release the code to your compute client except for the BOINC library you link against. You can probably run a private BOINC server on your intranet or on the internet and just not advertise it for people to find and join in. However the API appears to be C++ so it won't be trivial to integrate it with C# or Java. – Rup Jan 06 '11 at 12:13
  • Well, most of the interface is also in C, and iirc just externing from C# isn't too bad. It's been a long time since I touched it though. You might have difficulty finding volunteers for commercial apps, unless you want to use this underneath an app that people are paying for, which might be an interesting model. – Tim Barrass Jan 06 '11 at 12:20
  • Well I will incentivise volunteers by letting them use some of my products free according to their points. So broadly, i can write a wrapper layer C++ to C# if thats not too big. Rather than writing such framework (however small) myself, if i can get by with writing port layer to C# or something, i will give a try. Ok first i will try the FW in my intranet with dummy client app. Where to start for this ? – Munish Goyal Jan 06 '11 at 12:33
  • For that, I suggest you look at the BOINC developer pages linked from the site above. – Tim Barrass Jan 06 '11 at 13:32