Participation in an MIR/audio BOINC project please!

[The Beatsmith]

Hello all, not so sure if this is the right forum, but anyways:

I've been doing a PhD in my 'spare time' and it's coming to a close. In the last home run i need to complete some more experiments - well, just under 300,000 more to be exact. To get these results, i need some volunteer CPU power from machines all around the world.

You might be familiar with SETI@Home, that looks for extra terrestrial life by searching radio waves using pcs from all around the world... same deal, but for audio analysis. The field of research is 'Music Information Retrieval'.

If you have a spare PC (Linux or Windows only... probably won't get round to Mac support even though i'm a Mac guy) that you don't mind donating some time with, that'd be great. To be totally honest, i wouldn't do it with your 'main' laptop unless it's well ventilated. It can send your CPU pretty hot, etc. My laptop was bought for this purpose though, so i'm ok with it! happy

Of course, you can specify when the thing is run - i.e. only when your screen saver is on/your machine has been idle for 10 mins or whatever... and you can say 'only use 20%' or only use '80% of my CPU', or whatever. You can even say 'only run between 6pm-6am', for example. Or you can do what i do and set it to run 24/7 and use 100% of resources in order to hulk-smash through!

Cheers to anyone who can contribute some spare resource!

An old box you have kicking around could be really useful... The spiel/instructions are below!

Eddie

Hello all,

I'm conducting some experiments to complete the final stages of my Computer Science PhD research and would really appreciate your (computer's!) participation.

The experiments will use BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) to run my application in unused CPU cycles on your computer. The project is called 'DART' (Distributed Audio Retrieval using Triana) and is designed to facilitate the submission of Music Information Retrieval algorithms (created in Triana Triana - Open Source Problem Solving Software ) and computational tasks against remotely held audio content, and the automated retrieval of the
results.

There's more information on DART here: Eddies DART Project and you can read about BOINC on Wikipedia at Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If you could spare some (currently unused) computer resources to help out, I'd really appreciate that!

To participate is easy:

- Download and run BOINC from http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php
- Once downloaded select 'Attach to Project'.
- When prompted, enter Eddies DART Project (you can ignore the list of other BOINC projects)

That's all. The application will download the DART bundle and processing will start once the DART bundle's downloaded on the computer.

You can specify how much of your computers resources you want to allow BOINC/DART to use, which times it can be used, etc - it's very customisable so that it doesn't get in your way. BOINC is available for all platforms, but DART for BOINC is currently able to run on Windows 32/64-Bit and Linux 32/64-Bit - Mac OSX compatibility is coming soon. If you have a Mac and would like to participate, please let me know and I can email you when support is confirmed.

Thanks for your participation, I really appreciate it! If you have any questions, just ask.

Eddie

[The Beatsmith]

FWIW as you guys are musicians it might be semi-interesting to know what it's doing:

It's basically running a pitch detection algorithm on a load of different input files: acoustic guitar, oboe, violin, tubular bells, piano, distorted guitar. Each one of these is a 50-60mb wav file that plays a range of notes at a range of velocities.

It's doing a sweep of over 268,000 experiments/settings to find the optimal parameters or 'best settings' of the pitch detection algorithm... both overall for all instruments, and also tailored for each one like 'for acoustic guitar, use these settings, for piano use these'...

It's doing all that as a 'proof of concept' for a platform i've made called 'DART' which is a way to take audio algorithms ('MIR - Music Information Retrieval') design, implement, and then distribute them over thousands of computers... and BOINC is one way of doing that using volunteer computing... i've also used another distributed mechanism too, so i can also compare them.

Eventually the system could be used for many things, like a Music Recommendation Service that scans your MP3s and recommends you music based on the audio content etc...

But for now i'd be happy to just finish these results!

Cheers!

[jeremy.c.]

I fully support this! Unless of course the software determines Nicki Minaj is the best songwriter of all time...

I can't dedicate my laptop to this venture, but it sounds insanely cool and good on you for getting a PhD! Best luck.

[The Beatsmith]

Thanks very much! It's going well so far!

Eddie

[The Beatsmith]

Just as an update and a bump... essentially support for Windows XP has gone out of... the window. Sorry, for both the pun, and the lack of an XP version. Vista and Windows 7 seems fine, as well as Linux.

Any extra cpu time that could be donated would be awesome, thanks!