Software Update: Boinc 6.10.56

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing is a distributed computing platform available for Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, and Windows. A number of projects make use of this platform, such as SETI@home, rosetta@home, Leiden Classical and Hydrogen@Home. For more information about the how and what of Boinc, we refer you to this page. The developers released a new version for the different platforms several days ago with 6.10.56 as the version number. The list of changes since the previous entry in the Meuktracker looks like this:

Version 6.10.56:

• New: Updated localization files
• New: Added accessibility support for advanced view (Mac)
• New: Added support for parsing username and password information from environment variables
• New: Added ability to ignore specific GPU cards through the use of ignore device through the use of a configuration file option
• New: Added ability to suspend BOINC’s use of GPUs when certain applications are run through the use of a configuration file option
• New: Allow new screen saver options to be configured via the OS specific configuration screen
• New: Snooze GPU option off of the system tray menu
• New: Adjust GPU activity settings via the advanced view activity menu
• New: Added ability for a project to be specified as a “Backup Project” by setting its resource share to 0
• New: Suspend computation of BOINC applications if CPU usage from non-BOINC applications exceeds a volunteer defined value (Defaults to 25%)
• New: Support detecting SSE2, SSE3, and other forms of advanced instruction sets for older Windows machines (Windows)
• New: Support for custom installers to automatically cause new accounts to join a specific team when atteching to a project for the first time (Windows)
• New: Support for Nvidia Fermi cards
• New: Added support for ‘Transfer at most X Megabytes every N days’ preference
• Fix: Name resolution issues (Mac)
• Fix: Activity Menu display issues (Linux)
• Fix: Reduce CPU load in dealing with communications between manager and core client (Windows)
• Fix: Properly display project descriptions on Windows XP machines in the attach to project wizard
• Fix: Numerous CPU/GPU scheduling fixes
• Fix: Numerous work-fetch fixes
• Fix: Mac Installer for non-admin installs
• Fix: Recover from crashes in Nvidia and ATI GPU functions (Linux, Mac)
• Fix: Reap child processes spawned from a wrapper on Posix systems (Linux, Mac)
• Fix: If a project supports ATI or Nvidia projects, display their icons in the project list
• Fix: Show most commonly used preferences in use during startup via messages.

Version 6.10.18:

• Updated localization files
• Updated to OpenSSL 0.9.8l (Fixes a new man in the middle potential exploit due to encryption renegotiation)