Help libcaca research projects using CPUShare

Image processing research sometimes requires expensive computations, for instance analysing the quality of an algorithm on thousands of different images. You can help the project by selling or donating your idle CPU cycles. We use the ​CPUShare project for this: it provides all the infrastructure for reliable, secure and anonymous distributed computing.

Getting started

If you are using Debian or Ubuntu, just download one of the following packages:

• cpushare_0.47-0.1_i386.deb (32-bit platforms)
• cpushare_0.47-0.1_amd64.deb (64-bit platforms)
• dget http://libcaca.zoy.org/raw/CPUShare/cpushare_0.47-0.1.dsc (source package)

Then download our sell order and put it in /etc/cpushare/. If your machine has several CPUs, you can place several copies of the same file in /etc/cpushare/, just make sure their names end in .cpu.

Finally, simply run /etc/init.d/cpushare start and the CPUShare daemons will start.

If you are not using Debian or Ubuntu, well, good luck. CPUShare is one of the most unfriendly pieces of software I have ever seen.

What happens exactly?

Your machine's idle CPU cycles will be available on the CPUShare platform. The CPUShare daemons run at a very low priority (nice -19 by default) but you can stop them at any time if the impact on your system is too important.

There is no way to know whether your CPU will only be used for libcaca projects. However, because you use our .cpu file, the CPUCoins earned by running other software will be credited to the libcaca project's account, too. We will in turn use these CPUCoins to buy CPU cycles on other machines; maybe yours, maybe not.

If you do not like giving CPUCoins directly to the libcaca project, you can create your own .cpu file by creating an account on ​cpushare.com and ​creating a new sell order.