Running BOINC on Banana Pi M3

So I have my Banana Pi M3 sitting on my shelf, pretty much only serving as a low-power file server with samba shares. 8 cores, doing nothing 99% of the time. So I though, why not run BOINC on it and contribute to science projects a bit?

Hardware

• Banana Pi M3 (clocked down to 1GHz)
• Seagate 2 TB HDD
• Debian Jessie, as shown below.

lsb_release -a

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:    Debian
Description:    Debian GNU/Linux 8.5 (jessie)
Release:    8.5
Codename:    jessie

uname -a

Linux bananapi 3.4.39-BPI-M3-Kernel #22 SMP PREEMPT Wed Mar 16 12:07:48 CST 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux

Install

Installation is pretty straightforward and worked for me out of the box on the above mentioned installation.

1. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
2. sudo apt-get install boinc-client

Running

Now I don't have a screen attached to my Banana Pi M3, so I didn't download the boinc manager. There is the text interface tool, called boinctui, however I made the experience that it doesn't allow to connect to BAM! account manager. Hence I would rather connect from another machine on my local network with the boinc manager.

Furthermore, I would strongly recommend using an account manager (https://boincstats.com) and making a new "Work Preference" setting especially for the Banana Pi / other ARM devices. I have assigned 6 CPU cores total and a maximum usage of 100%. Also, the CPU clock rate of my device is throttled down to 1GHz to avoid overheating. (Yes, 8 cores heat quite a bit) Like this I am getting up to 63 degrees Celsius, thanks to my new over-sized heat sink!

To allow a remote boinc manager to connect I am running the client with the following command:

boinc --daemon --dir /path/to/BOINC/directory --no_gpus --allow_remote_gui_rpc 

As you can see I have a --dir option in there, which specifies the BOINC default directory. I have specified this on my 2 TB HDD so that there is plenty of space and not the 8 GB eMMC is used. It is running smoothly.

Running BOINC on my Banana Pi M3, currently 6 cores at 1 GHz.

Connect remotely

On your remote machine launch Boinc manager and go to File/Select Computer. In the popup window enter the IP address of the Banana Pi and the password. The latter is stored in the default BOINC directory under /Boinc/directory/gui_rpc_auth.cfg.  You can edit this simply with 

sudo nano /Boinc/directory/gui_rpc_auth.cfg

Select computer to control with Boinc manager.

After this you can easily add an account manager and synchronize with the projects and settings as per configured at https://boincstats.com. This way you can remotely adjust the settings as needed later on.

Considerations

HDD spin up/down timeout

By default you may have noticed that an attached hard drive is on continuously, it doesn't enter sleep/stand-by mode. To avoid this, I have added the following to my /etc/rc.local

sudo hdparm -S 25 /dev/sdb

This tells the drive to spin down if there was no activity in the last 25*5 seconds. Now if you have done the same, the smart thing to do (I guess) would be to limit  how often the boinc client can access the drive. I don't want it to have access every 60 seconds and spin up the drive for 5 seconds to write something and then wait 60 seconds again. This would be wasteful in terms of drive lifetime. Hence I would recommend setting the "Write to disk at most" parameter in the client settings to reasonably value. I am testing 1000 seconds for the moment.

This can be configured in your BAM! account at https://boincstats.com/en/bam/workPreferences/.

CPU clock settings

At the maximum of 2 GHz the 8 cores produce quite a bit of heat and therefore would continuously throttle back the whole device. Therefore I would recommend setting the maximum frequency a bit lower. The relevant system directory is /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq.

To see the available frequencies

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_frequencies

I have made the following script that sets up my CPU clockrate on every boot. From this you can easily deduct how to set what.

#!/bin/sh

#Sets the CPU's core frequency

echo ondemand > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
echo 1000000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq
echo 480000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_min_freq
echo 25 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/up_threshold
echo 10 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/ondemand/sampling_down_factor

You can save this script, make it executable with

sudo chmod +x script.sh

And then call it from e.g. /etc/rc.local to run at system boot.

You can experiment a bit to see what is best.

Heating

Check out my post to see how I have resolved this issue.
Large Heat Sink on the Banana Pi M3.