what are the prediction for the future version of Boinc ? ne add-on or we keep it simple and stay for a while with the same "package" ?I don't really know if I can put this link, but I'm finding a bit strange that we can find a place where we can dl a version in devellopement, and the screenshoots seems to show some important modifications

http://www.softpedia.com/progScreenshots/BOINC-Screenshot-59493.html

Sounds like a Windows Vista 'widget'.

There is no way in holy tar nation that is a BOINC screenshot. That's definitely a widget.

Um... a widget. I'm using 6.4.1 on XP, Linux, Mac, and now Vista. It uses the normal compact and traditional view.

My thoughts on future development? Core affinity, and possibly the ability to dedicate cores. I think you will have the ability, when 6, 8, + core home PC's are more common, to specify within BOINC, "keep core 0 free for the system, dedicate cores 6 and 7 to WCG projects, keep Climate^* running on core 5, and cores 1-4 are a free-for-all of the remaining projects."

^* To think, we may one day see processors powerful enough to finish a Climate @home work unit in our lifetime. It will probably just spit out, "42!".

One thing I would like to see is the ability to select a work unit an say "run to completion".

I think the BOINC manager will continue to better report optimized processor libraries (SSE4 and successors, etc.), and more projects will have BOINC manage downloading engines that use SSE and the expanded MMX / 3DNow libraries.

GPU processing will grow. I have a new video card going in my new PC today. I bought a card based on how well Folding@Home supports it, not its graphics power. (Sad, I know.) Other co-processing will appear. Cell processors are being uses on daughter cards for streaming computation, and Corel has a prototype of their DVD encoding suite that uses a Cell card. If Physix cards take off, that's another processor. The original Physix cards used a G4 600MHz processor. Also, there is work on raytrace accelerator cards. Whatever new goes into a computer, it's guaranteed someone will try to run SETI@Home on it. ;-)

I also think this year you will see SMP projects encroach into BOINC, though this will require overriding task management. Folding@Home already does this, thought I found out you need a minimum of 4 cores available. Basically, by making all computations possible vector based and written for SSE3 / SSE4x, you have one project run in parallel over all available cores.

Widgets will invade this year. Mac users couldn't get enough of 'em. Now, you can have widgets on Visa and Linux KDE. We will all be wading knee deep in widgets soon.

Lastly, I think the PS3 will continue to slowly grow as a force to be reckoned with. I think it would also be nice to see a Folding@Home type screen saver on the Wii or X-Box. I know neither has the crunching power of the PS3, but something running on 10,000 Wii's could do a lot of good for science.

Ok, one last, last thing. I've already read a paper for a model for a distributed computing platform for the Google Android phone platform. I think BOINC will hit Android. I think projects that do not need fast turn-around, can have small work units, and are primarily integer calculations (ABC, SIMAP) can really benefit from this. Personally, I don't have a cell phone, but if I knew I could get one that would run 2-3 SIMAP work units a week, I would probably pick one up.

Hahahaha who uploaded that BS to softpedia?

The screenshots are from a Yahoo Widget to show your statistics on the desktop. It has existed for years. You can get it from mundayweb BOINC stats.

BOINC 6.4 does exist, but it has almost no GUI changes compared to 6.2.

Core affinity will probably not happen. The tests I have seen only showed a significant improvement when discreet packages were involved, and showed a decrease in performance when hyperthreading was involved. In addition to that newer processors and OSs handle process allocation more efficiently anyway.

BOINC is ready for multithreaded applications with any version 6 client. Now all we need is for the projects to start supplying them.

I don't think a "run to completion" button will be practical. I do still have hope for "download 1 sec" and "run now" buttons though.

I think keeping some specific cores always running and other cores idle (without periodic rotation) would cause uneven heating of the CPU which I don't think is a good thing.