Tutorial: Desktop Grid Server Installation

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TutorialDesktop Grid Server Installation

• Gabor Szmetanko
• University of Westminster

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Agenda

• BOINC Desktop Grid installation
• Application porting with the DC-API
• Introduction, sample application
• Client side
• Master side
• Application deployment in BOINC

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Agenda

• BOINC Desktop Grid installation
• Application porting with the DC-API
• Introduction, sample application
• Client side
• Master side
• Application deployment in BOINC

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Overview of the installation procedure

• Network configuration
• MySQL server installation
• Apache web server installation
• PHP installation
• Mail server installation (if we want to send out
  registration details to the users)
• Installation of the BOINC packages
• Project creation

Note detailed description can be found at
http//www.desktopgrid.hu
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Network configuration1

• Change to root
• Enter the root password if prompted (boinc)

• Open the /etc/hosts file in your preferred editor

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Network configuration2

• The file should contain the following

Change the IP and the address of the second line
in the example to the values of your own!
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Installation of the necessary packages

• Install the following packages

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Configuration of MySQL1

• Generate a password for the MySQL root user

• Set this password as the new root password

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Configuration of MySQL2

• The BOINC scripts will access the database to
  automate them, create a /root/.my.cnf file with
  the following

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Updating the sources.list file1

• Open the /etc/apt/sources.list file in your
  preferred editor

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Example sources.list
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Updating the sources.list file2

• Add the following line to the end of sources.list

• Save the changes and close the editor

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Importing the GPG key of the repository

• Import the GPG key of the repository with the
  following command

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Installing the BOINC packages

• Update the package list

• Issue the following command to install the BOINC
  packages

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• Thats it!
• Your BOINC server is now installed
• Next, we can start to create our own BOINC project

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Creating a BOINC project

• Still as root, issue the boinc_create_project
  command

Give your project a short identifier and a
descriptive name, e.g.
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Granting administrative rights

• Grant project administrator rights to one or more
  Linux users (yourself)

Use the short name of the project as specified
previously, e.g.
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The project website

• Our new project is up and running
• If everything went well, you can load the website
  of your project into your browser
• The URL of the project website
• http//ltFQDNgt/ltshort-namegt
• FQDN is the fully qualified domain name of your
  PC
• short-name is your projects short name

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Example project website
Have a look at the sections of the site!
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Deploying a sample application

• Its time to deploy a real application into our
  project
• We will use the Digital Signal Processing
  application of the University of Westminster for
  this purpose

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The DSP application

• Digital alias-free signal processing application
• It uses periodic nonuniform sampling (PNS) to
  minimise the effects of aliasing
• The application designs PNS sequences
• Selection of optimal sampling sequence is a
  computationally expensive process
• Parallelisation can reduce the execution time

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Downloading the necessary files

• Close the root shell
• Go to your home folder and download the necessary
  files

• Extract the files from the archive

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The boinc_appmgr script

• SZTAKI has developed a script
• Makes application management easier
• In standard BOINC, application deployment is a
  multi-stage process
• Deploys a DG application and sets up the
  configuration files
• The configuration files can be customised after
  deployment

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Deploying the DSP application1

• Change to the project user

e.g.
Use the password you specified at the project
creation!
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Deploying the DSP application2

• Run the deployment script

• We will see the detailed description of this
  script later when we deploy our own application
• At the moment, just run the script as shown
• If the script finishes properly, you can start to
  use the DSP application

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Starting the server

• Start the server as the project user

• The previous script installed the DSP application
  as a daemon, so it starts automatically when the
  server starts

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Installing the BOINC client1

• Now that we have a running application we need
  some clients to do the work for us
• We need to install the BOINC client, which will
  fetch work units from the server

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Installing the BOINC client2

• Exit from the project users shell
• Install the BOINC client

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Starting the BOINC client

• The BOINC client should be started with the
  following command

• The client will show you a pop-up window, where
  you can attach your client to a project

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Attaching to the project

• Click on Next

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Attaching to the project

• Enter the URL of your project (same as the URL of
  the website) and click Next

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Attaching to the project

• Create a new user account and click Next

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Attaching to the project

• If everything is OK, you should see the following

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Checking the status of the computation

• On the tasks tab you can check the status of the
  computation
• The master will receive the results in a few
  minutes
• In the meantime, connect your client to your
  neighbours projects as an exercise