This paper describes perspective platforms that can be used by BOINC for distributed computing: mobile devices (Android, iOS, Windows Phone) and video game consoles (Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Wii/Switch). For now, BOINC supports Android devices only. During this research, I've found that iOS is not suitable for our purposes because of platform limitations and Windows Phone is not suitable too because of low market share. Video game consoles are more suitable for our purposes. Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Wii/Switch a good enough to be supported by BOINC distributed computing network.
These platforms are not supported by BOINC yet: • iOS mobile devices • Windows mobile phones • Sony PlayStation • Microsoft Xbox • Nintendo Wii/Switch
Next, we need to define whether these platforms can potentially produce a significant performance gains to BOINC infrastructure and can be easily used by users. 2
There are 3 main mobile platforms: Android, iOS, Windows Phone. Android is the most widespread mobile OS
in the world (2), it is installed on 86.8% of mobile phones [
Currently BOINC supports Android based devices only. BOINC for Android is presented as two separate
applications: official application [
Android BOINC application supports CPU calculations only. But all or almost all modern GPUs used in mobile devices supports OpenCL. From one hand adding tasks which will use GPU can increase their performance but from another hand this will lead to device overheat because of GPU intensive tasks which are the most ‘hot’ one. Such tasks can probably run on those Odroid devices only which have active cooling [14].
There is no possibility to count users who actively run BOINC on their mobile devices especially on HTC
because of preinstalled application but official BOINC application has more than 100 000 installations [
Devices based on Windows Phone same as Android smart phones are produced by several manufacturers. They have different configuration but these differences are not significant. If we will compare one of the top Android smartphone (Meizu Pro 6 [17]) and one of the top Windows Phone device (HP Elite x3 [18]) we will see that their configurations are quite similar (Table 2). As we can see from this table, Android based smartphone has more powerful CPU because of 10 available cores. Even despite of different core frequencies of Android device CPU, in total it can make more calculation than Windows Phone device at the same amount of time.
From the other hand, Windows Phone device has 4 times more powerful GPU than Android device [19]. But as it was mentioned above, GPU tasks are hot and can lead to device overheat so GPU tasks can’t run all the available time.
But using the information from Table 1 we can assume that share (0.3%) and potential user interest ( 346 installations) in BOINC for Windows Phone is too low and the development for this platform is inadvisable even despite of powerful GPU. 2.3 iOS iOS devices have 12.5% share (Table 1) and potential user interest ( 14401 installations) are rather less than Android one but much bigger than Windows Phone share and potential user interest.
Unlike Android and Windows Phone based smartphones iOS devices are manufactured by Apple only so there are no variety in device configurations of the same generation. As we can see from Table 3, the situation with the top iOS smartphone iPhone 7 Plus is the same as with Windows Phone HP Elite x3: it has less powerful CPU but more powerful GPU [20].
In normal mode BOINC works when device is not used by user, plugged into a power source and the battery is charged 90% or more to prevent reducing battery life or increasing recharge time [16]. This means that BOINC science applications need run in background. But iOS has limitations for background tasks: only audio players, audio recorders, VoIP applications, or applications which send, receive or process small packets of data from time to time, can run in background [21]. If the application will intensively use resources it will be terminated by the system. These limitations can be solved by creating a BOINC application which will run by user in fore-ground only. Screen of the device should be always on to prevent iOS send application to the background. Also, iOS applications have another limitation: they cannot execute downloaded binaries. In this case BOINC applications should include all project binaries.
The way proposed in [15] to run applications in Python virtual machine is nice for testing but is not acceptable for wide use because of complexity: user need to ‘jail break’ iOS device and install BOINC from non-official package source. And in this case applications should run in foreground too. 2.4
Both iOS and Windows Phone platforms are unsuitable to run BOINC applications: iOS has many limitations to run background applications and downloaded binaries and Windows Phone device are not so widely spread as Android devices. So, development of BOINC applications for these platforms is inadvisable. 3
There are 3 main giants in video game console industry: Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft [22]. Sony is the biggest one. This company sold 13.94 million devices during 2016 year (52% of all sold video game consoles). Nintendo has almost the same market share as Microsoft: 6.66 (24.9%) and 6.14 (23%) million devices sold respectively (3).
As we can see from the Table 4 PlayStation 4 Pro has the most powerful GPU [27] and it has OpenCL
support as well as Xbox One S [
Sony has several models of their famous video game consoles (Table 5): PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro. There are also 2 portable models: PlayStation Portable and PlayStation Vita.
First generation of PlayStation video game consoles has very slow CPU (33.8688 MHz) and only 1 core [23]. So, these devices can’t be used by BOINC.
CPU used in PlayStation 2 is better (299 MHz) [24] and can be compared to Intel Pentium III used in the
first generation of Xbox video game consoles [
PlayStation 3 has very powerful Cell BE CPU (3.2 GHz, 8 cores) and 256 MB of RAM [25]. It has powerful
RSX GPU also but unfortunately it doesn’t support OpenCL [26] so this GPU can’t be used in calculations.
PlayStation 3 has access to PlayStation Network [
PlayStation 4 has less powerful AMD CPU (1.6 GHz, 8 cores) than PlayStation 3 but has 8 GB of RAM
[27]. Also, it has AMD GPU (1840 FLOPS) with OpenCL sup-port. Both CPU and GPU make this device very
attractive for BOINC. As well as PlayStation 3 this generation of video game consoles has access to PlayStation
Net-work [
PlayStation 4 Pro has the same configuration as the previous one but has more powerful both CPU (2.1 GHz, 8 cores) and GPU (4200 GFLOPS) [27]. Currently this generation of video game consoles suits best for BOINC application.
Currently only 2 models of PlayStation portable video game consoles are present-ed: PlayStation Portable
and PlayStation Vita. Both have very slow CPU: 222 MHz, 2 cores in PlayStation Portable [28], [
But there is also one issue: BOINC application should be run manually by user as there is no possibility to run applications in background because of the architecture and the main purpose of the video game consoles.
Using the information listed above we can conclude that only 3 PlayStation mod-els are suitable for the BOINC application: PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro. The BOINC application for this platform should be published on PlayStation Network to let users download and run it without any unusual actions. 3.2
Microsoft produced 4 generations of their video game consoles: Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One and Xbox One
S (Table 6). First generation of these devices has very slow CPU (733 MHz, 1 core) [
Xbox 360 has the same architecture of the Xenon CPU as PlayStation 3 with one difference: it has 3 physical
cores and 6 logical cores (96 GFLOPS) [
Both Xbox One and Xbox One S have almost the same configuration (1.75 GHz, 8 cores, 8 GB RAM) [
Xbox devices as well as PlayStation devices have the same issue: BOINC need to be run manually by user and it can’t be started automatically in background because of the main purpose of the game consoles. As a conclusion, we can say that BOINC can be created and installed using Xbox Live service for next Xbox models: Xbox 360, Xbox One and Xbox One S. 3.3
Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Wii/Switch are very good platforms and they could potentially increase the total power of the BOINC distributed calculation network. After this research, we can conclude that the most perspective platform is Sony PlayStation. Less power can produce Microsoft Xbox devices: they are less effective and are not so popular and distributed as Sony PlayStation. Least effective platform if Nintendo Wii/Switch. This video game consoles were never designed to be the powerful one and are not so popular as Sony PlayStation also.
So BOINC application might be supported by Sony PlayStation first, then by Microsoft Xbox and at last by Nintendo Wii/Switch. 4
Currently BOINC is present on Android mobile devices only but doesn’t support GPU calculations that will increase the speed of calculations but also will lead to device overheat. That is why GPU support on mobile devices is very attractive but dangerous too because can damage the device itself. It can be supported by Odroid devices only. iOS platform has many limitations (e.g. no possibility to run application in background). Market share of Windows Phone devices is too low. That is why both iOS and Windows Phone devices are not suitable for BOINC.
Video game consoles are not so wide spread as mobile devices but their total amount is significant. Sony is the main player on this market, their device has more than 50% of total market share. PlayStation devices are the most powerful too so these two factors (market share and effectiveness) make this platform the best candidate to support BOINC. Both Microsoft and Nintendo have the same market share ( 25%) but Nintendo video game consoles have less effectiveness than Microsoft Xbox devices. This makes Microsoft more attractive for BOINC than Nintendo but last one can be used for distributed calculations also.
Finally, we can say that the potential platforms for distributed BOINC calculations are (sorted from most effective to less effective): Sony PlayStation (PlayStation 4 Pro, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3), Microsoft Xbox (Xbox One S, Xbox One, Xbox 360), Nintendo Wii/Switch (Switch, Wii U, Wii). [13] US supercomputer needs more people power. [Online] https://goo.gl/RmB6gI [14] ODROID devices. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ODROID [15] Black, Michael, and William Edgar. Exploring mobile devices as Grid resources: Using an x86 virtual machine to run BOINC on an iPhone. Grid Computing, 2009 10th IEEE/ACM International Conference on.
IEEE, 2009. [16] Android FAQ. [Online] http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Android FAQ [17] Meizu Pro 6 Specification. [Online] https://www.meizu.com/en/products/pro6/spec.html [18] HP Elite x3 Specification. [Online] https://goo.gl/5bTlIv [19] GPU Performance Comparison. [Online] http://kyokojap.myweb.hinet.net/gpu gflops/ [20] iPhone 7 Plus Specification. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone 7#cite note-4 [21] App Programming Guide for iOS. [Online] https://goo.gl/7YPI30 [22] Video gaming console marker share 2016. [Online] https://goo.gl/LQJpFI [23] PlayStation Specification. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation (console) [24] PlayStation 2 Specification. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation 2 [25] PlayStation 3 Specification. [Online] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation 3 [26] NVIDIA RSX Reality Synthesizer. [Online] https://goo.gl/m4xele [27] PlayStation 4 Specification. [Online] https://goo.gl/YdmcpF [28] PlayStation Portable Specification. [Online] https://goo.gl/hBm2LU