Hi,

I'm not a member of the project, but I don't think there will be a 64-bit version of most of the scientific projects, because all the "real work" is FLOATING POINT operations.

A much better options would be a SSE-enabled version of Rosetta, which should speed overall projects TeraFLOPS up by 3.5x - 4x times, as F@H experience has shown the last few years.

Building BOINC Clients and Applications on Macintosh OSX

Written by Charlie Fenton
Last updated 2/22/06

This document applies to BOINC version 5.3.19 and later. It has instructions for building BOINC for Macintosh OSX, plus information for building science project applications to run under BOINC on Macintosh OSX.

Contents:

• Important requirements for building BOINC software for the Mac.

• Building BOINC libraries to link with project applications.

• Building BOINC Manager, BOINC Client and BOINC libraries.

• Building BOINC Manager Installer.

• Building project applications / upgrading applications for Macs with Intel processors.

Building project applications

Upgrading applications for Macs with Intel processors

Apple began shipping Macs with Intel processors on January 10, and Apple expects to convert all its lines of computers to Intel by the end of 2006.

All future releases of BOINC will include "universal binary" builds for the Macintosh of BOINC Manager, command-line BOINC client and the boinc_cmd command-line tool. (Universal binaries contain both PowerPC and Intel executables in one file; the Macintosh OS automatically selects the appropriate one for that computer.)

The advantage of "universal binaries" is that you only need to have one copy of the application, and it will run on either PowerPC or Intel Macs, so users don't need to choose between two options. Since BOINC participants manually download BOINC from the web site, we will be providing BOINC in "universal binary" form.

However, participants do not manually download project applications; this is done automatically by BOINC. So there would be no advantage to combining the Intel and PowerPC versions in a single "universal binary" file, but doing so would double the size of the download.

So BOINC treats Intel Macs as a new, separate platform. BOINC previously directly supported four platforms: PowerPC Macs (powerpc-apple-darwin), Intel Linux (i686-pc-linux-gnu), Windows (windows-intelx86) and Solaris (sparc-sun-solaris2.7).

We have now added a fifth platform for Intel Macs (i686-apple-darwin).

As a temporary measure, projects can set their servers to deliver a copy of their current PowerPC application (renamed for the new platform) under the new i686-apple-darwin platform. The OS will run it in compatibility mode, emulating a PowerPC. (Apple calls this compatibility mode Rosetta, which of course has nothing to do with the Rosetta BOINC project.)

If you do this, be sure to give your native Intel application a higher version number when you do release it, so that clients will download it.

However, running a PowerPC application in compatibility mode has two significant drawbacks:

(1) Screensaver graphics do not work.

(2) Since it is running under emulation, your application will run at reduced efficiency. But the benchmarks are based on running native Intel applications. This may cause scheduler problems, such as uncompleted deadlines and inadequate credit for participants.

So it is important to make a native Intel application available as soon as possible.

It is very easy to add a new platform to your server with the xadd utility. For directions on how to do this, see these web pages:

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/platform.php

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/tool_xadd.php

BOINC supports all PowerPC Macs running OS 10.3.0 or later, and all Intel Macs. (The Intel Macs themselves require OS 10.4.4 or later.)

The easiest way to build your application for these two platforms is to build each one on its native platform. In other words, do your powerpc-apple-darwin build on a PowerPC Mac running OS 10.3.9, and your i686-apple-darwin build on an Intel Mac.

But Apple provides the tools to allow you to cross-compile your application on any Mac (PowerPC or Intel) running OS 10.4 or later. Here is how:

All BOINC software for Power PC Macs must be built using GCC 3.3 and MacOS10.3.9 SDK to assure backward compatibility with OS 10.3. If building a PowerPC application on an Intel Mac, you must also specify "-arch ppc" in the compiler and linker flags.

All BOINC software for Intel Macs must be built using GCC 4.0 and MacOS10.4.u SDK to allow cross-compiling. If building an Intel application on a PowerPC Mac, you must also specify "-arch i386" in the compiler and linker flags.

You can find examples of how to do this for two different kinds of configure / make scripts in the HEAD branch of the BOINC CVS tree at boinc/mac_build/buildcurl.sh and boinc/mac_build/buildjpeg.sh.

The lipo utility is used at the end of each of these scripts to combine the two binaries into a single "Universal Binary" file. You won't need to do that with you project applications, since you will be distributing them separately under the two platforms. But if you prefer, you can create a Universal Binary and distribute the same file for both i686-apple-darwin and powerpc-apple-darwin platforms.

Note that the BOINC libraries (and any third-party libraries) which you link with your applications must be built with the same configuration as the application itself. Follow the instructions earlier in this document to build the needed libraries.

Additional information on building Unix applications universal can be found here:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Porting/Conceptual/PortingUnix/compiling/chapter_4_section_3.html

and here:

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/universal_binary/universal_binary_compiling/chapter_2_section_7.html


For information on making your code work with GCC 4:

http://developer.apple.com/releasenotes/DeveloperTools/GCC40PortingReleaseNotes/index.html

hi m9 & colleagues,

I got an email that you'd moved a posting of mine from the guidelines thread to the feedback thread, which is fair enough if that is a better place to put it.

However, it seems that although the email says you moved it, in fact the thread has been hidden where it was before. Is this a bug, or did your mouse slip at the crucial moment?

Feel free to delete this post once my original posting has been found, or let me know if it has been lost in cyberspace and I will type it in again

R~~

Your post was moved and I checked to see that it arrived. The thread was deleted, as it was not a guideline. Check occasionally for Mod to Mod messages.

If you have been around Distributed Computing since it's infancy, you should realize by now that a fair and equitable credit system is what keeps people at a project.

Sure, you get a few percent who are in it "for the science", but reality is that the biggest portion of the crunching power comes for the credits, and leaves rather quickly when the credit system goes awry.

On a production project you'd be right. That is why on Rosetta, the sister production project, David has put work in to correct errors that lose people credit.

On a test project, like this, we do not need very many people, and we particularly want the people who are interested in building up the science. So while you are still right that when the credit goes awry a lot of people will leave, the difference is that here it won't matter - it could even be an advantage if it leaves us with a higher proportion of those who will give constructive feedback over problems other than credit.

Like, a thousand crunchers is more than enough for a test project (so long as there is a good distribution of different speed boxes and different operating systems). If the only-in-it-for-the-credit crew self select themselves onto another project that is good news, not bad.

Personally so long as they stay on any BOINC project I'd be delighted - I guess the official project view is to hope they'd move over to Rosetta in particular.

Hmm, looks like there is some mess in teams list. As I see it now the L'Alliance Francophone team (teamid=24) is also on 20 and 21 rank.

There is another weird problem with my team (Boinc.sk, teamid=34 -> probably the last team at this moment) it is not showing in the list of all teams. However it appears in list of unclassified teams.

For me it looks like bug in selecting which teams to show on which screen.