distro

distro is an implementation of the BOINC client in JavaScript.

BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is an open-source software for computing using volunteered resources.

Currently, the BOINC client works like this:

1. The client fetches new jobs from a scheduling server.
2. The client runs the jobs
3. The client sends the results back to the server for evaluation.

However, the BOINC client is an executable that runs on your computer. This project aims to implement the BOINC client on browsers so that jobs can be executed while browsing the web.

Overview

This project has three components:

1. The distro client (in client/)
2. A CORS Proxy (in proxy/)
3. An example BOINC server that supports distro (in server/)

You will need the following to run the components:

1. yarn
2. Docker with docker-compose

The distro client is a JavaScript file that communicates with the BOINC server. It retrieves jobs and executes them. After that, it sends the results back to the BOINC server.

The CORS Proxy allows the BOINC server to be accessed by the distro client. As BOINC servers currently do not implement CORS, this CORS proxy is needed to allow distro to talk to the BOINC server.

Lastly, the BOINC server houses (and generates) all the jobs for distro to run. Typically BOINC servers generate jobs and houses executables (e.g. .exe) for the client to download and run.

Building and running the distro client

1. Run yarn install -g http-server. This will install a http server to load the sample page.
2. Run yarn install. This will install all the dependencies used by this project.
3. Run yarn run webpack. This will build the minifed JavaScript file that is used by index.html.
4. Run http-server . in the same directory as index.html. This will start the http server.
5. Go to http://127.0.0.1:8080
6. 🎉🎉🎉

You can also run yarn run watch instead of yarn run webpack to have webpack watch for any changes to the file.

To build for production, run yarn run prod.

Running the CORS Proxy

1. Run yarn install
2. Run yarn run app
3. That's all!

Running the BOINC server

1. Run docker-compose up or sudo docker-compose up if you do not have sufficient privileges
2. You should now see the project page at http://127.0.0.1/boincserver