Problems with BOINC

I’m a long time user of BOINC. In fact I was an early user of the old SETI@Home project before BOINC was even established.

Over the years I’ve tried some project managers with BOINC, starting with GridRepublic, and then moving to World Community Grid when I joined IBM in 2005.

A few years ago it seemed to me that GridRepublic was no longer being maintained and so I dabbled with ScienceUnited as well.

But in the end I didn’t like the strain that ScienceUnited was putting on my laptop, and I felt that I had to spend far too much time tweaking and monitoring it so that it completed the work units on time. So I decided to switch back to World Community Grid where I could easily specify limits that I was comfortable with and knew they would be respected.

At the beginning of 2022, IBM transferred the WCG project to Krembil, and as part of the migration all work was stopped. When the project came back online I wasn’t getting new work units.

So today I finally took the time to look into this.

Removing and re-adding the WCG project from BOINC didn’t solve the problem. In fact, I was unable to re-add the project at all to my BOINC manager; I just got errors when trying to do so. So I tried removing the application entirely and re-installing from the version downloaded from the BOINC website, and from the WCG website. Neither of those solved the problem. I was sometimes able to add the project to the BOINC manager, and sometimes not. But even when it did add I was unable to get any work units to transfer.

Performing a scrub of the program files directories and the registry didn’t move things forward for me either.

But finally, installing the BOINC client as downloaded from ScienceUnited and then using it to attach to World Community Grid worked. The project attached and new work units are being downloaded in a reasonable timeframe.

Odd. But it works.