HTC have just announced "Power To Give", a new BOINC-based initiative for volunteer distributed computing on Android smartphones. HTC deserve to be commended for putting effort into helping the development of a polished BOINC client for Android.

You can read all about it here: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-02/24/htc-power-to-give and see a video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0oJ39vs_Kk

GPUGRID's very own Gianni De Fabritiis presented at the launch, happening as part of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Video to follow soon, but you can read as-it-happened coverage here http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/02/htc-mobile-world-congress-press-conference-live-blog-follow-all-the-news-as-it-happens/

We're very excited about this! Expect more news soon...

Matt

How does this app compare to the other BOINC apps for android? What are the differences?

Also, does this mean that there will be a GPUGRID work for android?

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA

It is likely that we will come out on the standard BOINC app first as the HTC one requires some changes on the server software.

On mobiles phones is not going to be the same app that we use on gpus. It's going to be a CPU application working on linux, windows, and android.

gdf

Great! Looking forward to it!

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Reno, NV
Team: SETI.USA

Samsung Power Sleep was also announced.

http://www.samsung.com/at/microsite/powersleep/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLalcVLLbHU The video in English

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yes, that's a single project also for Android.

Yes power sleep is simap without boinc and account connection.

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DSKAG Austria Research Team: http://www.research.dskag.at

The Crunch on Your Smartphone Usage Model:

1) tweet about how you're doing BOINC on your phone and it's the coolest thing ever
2) update Facebook page about how you just tweeted about doing the coolest thing ever
3) put phone in pocket and leave for work
4) notice phone in pocket is HOT
5) get to work, take out phone to update Facebook page you just arrived at work and discover phone is now cold..... because battery is dead
6) use work computer to update Facebook page that your phone battery is dead and you're recharging it now
7) repeat 6) 10 more times before you get home from work
8) repeat 1) through 7) until you realize it's impossible to crunch unless the phone is constantly on the charger which then renders it useless as a mobile device
9) uninstall BOINC
10) tweet about how installing BOINC on your phone was the dumbest thing ever
11) read all the other tweets about people discovering that their cell phone battery has a maximum number of recharges and how crunching just reduced the life of their battery from 2 years to 2 months
12) realize that the only reason the phone companies support BOINC is to make themselves look good
13) read the stats that after 5 months of crunching 24/7, 2 million cell phones did the same amount of work as 1 P4 desktop
14) tweet "What's a P4 desktop and where can I get one, I hear it can do the same work as 2 million cell phones... that's the coolest thing ever!"

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

I do charge my phone over night, when I sleep! I do run BOINC only when phone is charged 100%. Still manage to get the Einstein WUs (and the one GPUGRID WU that worked) done within the allowed max. time.

Said so, that is how I think the projects should design their WUs for ANDROID, get the work done in the given time, when you are asleep, not for crunching 24/7.

If your focus on maximum points then you are right, buy PC and a GPU and crunch with linux! By the way: Dagorath, thanks for your linux thread! Very interesting.

Indeed Dagorath, the point is to crunch while charging it overnight. I cannot imagine people crunching during the day and killing their phones battery. Hence why Samsung also calls it power sleep :)

Indeed Dagorath, the point is to crunch while charging it overnight. I cannot imagine people crunching during the day and killing their phones battery. Hence why Samsung also calls it power sleep :)

This and the default settings of the BOINC app on Google Play is to only run while on charger... So, anyone having Dagorath's issues with phone discharge would have decided to run it that way. Most people are aware of the battery drain while the app is running like most other CPU intensive apps and so can figure out rather quickly that they should only run it while charging. You will also find that by running BOINC while charging only it wont be killing the battery as he describes. Many of us have ran BOINC (or nativeBOINC) on phones for ~2 years now and haven't replaced any of the hardware. There certainly are some ARM devices that probably aren't well suited for BOINC, most I have seen hold up quite well.

And before someone pipes up about how it is further dumb to buy a bunch of these to replace their current farms, most people are just adding these devices to them as they purchase them for other uses. They tend to be very efficient when looking at power draw and continue to get better. BOINC may influence which one they purchase, but very few are purchasing just for BOINC.

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OK, I'm in which means I'll give it a try but as someone else said... task sizes and deadlines are going to have to be tailored to the usage pattern of crunching only while charging. I don't use my cell phone much and find I need to charge it only once per week. I'll try to remember to charge nightly but that might not happen so it might take me a month to return a result. If it doesn't work for me I'll just chalk it up to the fact that some things aren't suitable for everybody but I hope project admins are extremely lenient with deadlines else I fear it's not going to work for a lot of people.

If it does work as simple and easy as they make it sound then with HTC and Samsung pushing it, this could be the biggest free BOINC promo to date. It might even encourage people who have never heard of BOINC to install BOINC on their desktops.

How's this going to work on Apple gear? Will they make users download tasks from iTasks at a cost of $1.50 per task? Will iHeads pay and tout it as another benefit of owning an iPhone that you can't get on any other brand?

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

How's this going to work on Apple gear? Will they make users download tasks from iTasks at a cost of $1.50 per task? Will iHeads pay and tout it as another benefit of owning an iPhone that you can't get on any other brand?

Simple...it isn't. No iOS application at this time.

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If you charge once per week you are probably not using a smartphone (or you let the battery die and don't care?). I haven't seen a smartphone whose battery lasts more than 1.5 days

I dunno, it seems smart enough to me. I think the battery lasts a week because I rarely turn it on. I turn it on when I need to make a call and when the call is over I turn it off. See I have the thing as a convenience for me not as a convenience for other people. If they want to talk to me they can leave a voicemail and I'll get back to them if and when I feel like it. Otherwise they can email me. I'm hearing impaired, don't like talking to people unless they talk really loud or I can read their lips. Email is better.

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BOINC <<--- credit whores, pedants, alien hunters

The Crunch on Your Smartphone Usage Model:

1) tweet about how you're doing BOINC on your phone and it's the coolest thing ever
2) update Facebook page about how you just tweeted about doing the coolest thing ever
3) put phone in pocket and leave for work
4) notice phone in pocket is HOT
5) get to work, take out phone to update Facebook page you just arrived at work and discover phone is now cold..... because battery is dead
6) use work computer to update Facebook page that your phone battery is dead and you're recharging it now
7) repeat 6) 10 more times before you get home from work
8) repeat 1) through 7) until you realize it's impossible to crunch unless the phone is constantly on the charger which then renders it useless as a mobile device
9) uninstall BOINC
10) tweet about how installing BOINC on your phone was the dumbest thing ever
11) read all the other tweets about people discovering that their cell phone battery has a maximum number of recharges and how crunching just reduced the life of their battery from 2 years to 2 months
12) realize that the only reason the phone companies support BOINC is to make themselves look good
13) read the stats that after 5 months of crunching 24/7, 2 million cell phones did the same amount of work as 1 P4 desktop
14) tweet "What's a P4 desktop and where can I get one, I hear it can do the same work as 2 million cell phones... that's the coolest thing ever!"

Sorry, I completely disagree to that.
I'm using my first tablet, a POV, as a kitchen radio and weather station, is attached to mains 7/24 and does a good job @ MW and Simap. Will never be used as a mobile device, so I don't have to care about battery.
I use my 7" Nexus as navi, as a presentation device for ppt's and Excel's, as a pdf-reader and, of course, for crunching. I use it in that way since september last year, did not see any loss of battery power since then.
I use my smartphone also as a crunching device; have made a setup to crunch until battery power reaches 70%, the rest is good enough for use as telefon for the rest of the day.
No, I'm using not the Samsung app, I use native boinc. Can make any setup I like and can control it via Boinc Tasks.
In addition I run a developer board, a quad core Arm 9 overclocked to 2 GHz, currently crunching for simap. My slowest i7 mobile @ 1.7GHz makes one wu in 62 min, the arm uses 73 min for one wu. My developement board draws 7 watts from the wall and crunches 7/24.
The needs for the different projects are very different. And the hardware development for the arm platform is just at the beginning. There are tablets on the market running @ 2.3 GHz, they have NEON (comparable to SSE) hardware and more and more devices have a gpu on board (Mali, nVidea). There are open-CL lib's available for these devices. It highly depends on the developers to make use of these capabilities.
I doubt that GPUGRID is the perfect project for current arm devices. But no one knows how the number of participants develop. @ Simap is a post in the german forum that ~10% of the overall credit is crunched by arm devices which is much more than a single P4 desktop ...

Alexander

What's the world coming to? Soon we will be crunching on shirt buttons and then on implants in our brains run by the electrical power of our own thoughts. We could replace our fingernails with photo voltaic cells and generate power for the grid.

EDIT TO ADD

You do realise that mam being man he will use all this research into genetics, proteins and other things to create monsters and targeted bio weapons long before he uses it to cure illness.

You do realise that mam being man he will use all this research into genetics, proteins and other things to create monsters and targeted bio weapons long before he uses it to cure illness.

Someone's going to do that in secret anyway, so it's better push open research than leaving it all to military and large coorporations.

MrS

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Scanning for our furry friends since Jan 2002

You do realise that mam being man he will use all this research into genetics, proteins and other things to create monsters and targeted bio weapons long before he uses it to cure illness.

Some people just don't have an 'enough is enough' switch and are always pushing the envelope. Bernie Madoff did it in the investment field, Jonas Salk did it when he tested his own kids with his as yet untried cure. Sometimes it works out for the best, alot of the time it doesn't. When it doesn't word tends to get out at some point and other people don't go down that path. Some guy in Europe is cloning sheep today for human replacement organ research, he says sheep are better then mice for his research and no one else is cloning sheep. IF it works out it could be a way for alot of the war and other injured to be made whole again without a ton of metal and other fancy artifacts hanging off of them. If it doesn't work we could be looking at another "The Island of Doctor Moreau" story. I think it is slightly naive to think that everyone will be totally on the up and up with any research, someone will ALWAYS take off on a tangent and run with it. The idea of humanity though, I HOPE, is that MOST people will do the right thing and have an 'enough is enough' switch.