Using BOINC with podman on Fedora

Following the blog post Installing and configuring Folding@Home in Fedora by jorti, I would like to talk of BOINC too.

I'm not a scientist, I only know that BOINC is a distributed computing system where you can donate CPU cycles of you computer to scientific projects. You can join various projects, from astrophysics to biology.

You can find more informations here: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

On #Fedora you can find the boinc-client as well the boinc-manager in the official repository.

But to speed up configuration, you can use the BOINC Docker image with podman.

mkdir /home/youruser/boinc

podman run -d \
  --name boinc \
  --net=host \
  --pid=host \
  -v /home/youruser/rosetta:/var/lib/boinc:Z \
  -e BOINC_GUI_RPC_PASSWORD="1234" \
  -e BOINC_CMD_LINE_OPTIONS="--allow_remote_gui_rpc" \
  boinc/client

Now install the boinc-manager (the GUI) on your host:

sudo dnf install boinc-manager

Then connect to the boinc-client running inside the podman container.

boincmgr --verbose -n localhost -p 1234

If you run the boinc-client on a remote machine, configure the firewall allowing the 31416 TCP port.

sudo firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=31416/tcp

sudo firewall-cmd --reload

Now you can join the Rosetta@Home project.

More info: https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/f5as77/distributed_computing_project_rosettahome_is/