It would be great to be able to use the the PS3 and XBOX360 to download and crunch data from SETI etc. Considering that the processing power of the upcoming PS3 and XBOX360 are so much greater than that of PCs, their network/broadband connection and with them being able to download online content, they would make a great option to a PC. Is this possible? Seems like they'd be ideal for this sort of thing. Thanks, T1mmy.

Now's the time to make tyourself famous. With only a handful of personnel at Berkeley and a few volunteer developers, they need people like you to carry your idea's forward and see if it is practical. The source code is open so give it a go.

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I agree, the gaming boxes become better more and more and in the future a large ammount of computing power will be concentrated at home in set top boxes, gaming hardware and harddiskrecorders and other things like this. So it is a potential area for Distributed Computing and for BOINC.

One problem here will be that this systems are closed commercial systems and I bet, that if Microsoft will allow or support distributed computing on the X-box, there will be a commercial interest behind this and SETI@home is not the top position on the candidates list.

Technically all this systems use different hardwar, not as uniform as this is with PCs. This means not on all systems there is hardware support for high level computations. Quick Gaming has different needs then quick computation. And this means you have to program everything new for every system. That for example is one problem with the idea of using graphic cards for SETI@home computations too.

So at the moment its a nice wish not more, but for the future there must be found a way to use all this non-PC hardware at home.

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Greetings from Bremen/Germany
Jens Seidler (TheBigJens)

A couple of notes on this subject (from someone who fiddled with it on PS2).

1) The boxes are designed for graphical throughput and gaming. Even though the specs look good they have a couple of limiting factors that turn them into only average crunching machines (that's not bad at all, just don't consider them to be your top crunchers)

2) Same as 1 but this time heat: Their CPU core fans are not designed for running at 100% 24/7. If you do this, please remember to hav enough ventilation around the box. Don't store it under something - the hot air won't be able to get away.

3) It takes a lot of time (and a few tricks) to set up BOINC on consoles:
- Crack the console protection software using either a mod-chip or a buffer overrun in some game (James bond 007 if I remember correctly for PS2) OR buy an official linux kit
- Install linux using either a USB harddrive+keyboard or the PS2 harddrive that comes with the linux kit (which I guess you can't buy anymore)
- Install development libraries by compiling them
- Buy an ethernet adaptor
- Set up networking
- download, compile and install more development libraries (needed by BOINC)
- Fiddle with the ones that won't compile and finally compile them
- Install BOINC by compiling it
- Compile seti/boinc
- Install seti/boinc using the anonymous platform
- Run boinc
- smile =)
- Write a howto

4) It voids warranty.

This would be great. I would imagine Microsoft would jump on board really quickly with this idea. I bet they would even help program s@h for the console themselves. Somebody needs to get this moving forward now...

This would be great. I would imagine Microsoft would jump on board really quickly with this idea. I bet they would even help program s@h for the console themselves. Somebody needs to get this moving forward now...

David Anderson posted to the boinc_dev mailing list on Sat, 26 Aug 2006.

I asked MS for help porting BOINC to Xbox about a year ago.
They said no.
I asked them again 2 days ago, after the F@h/playstation story came
out.
They said they'd think about it.

-- David

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Boinc V7.2.42
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