I'm wondering how many of you guys have Xbox 360's. Do you think it would be possible for a BOINC client to be made for the 360? If it were possible, and available for download, would you download it? Would you pay any money for it? If so, how much?

I don't know how BOINC could be put onto the Xbox Live Marketplace, though. Can anybody sell BOINC for a profit? Even the University of California? If they could sell it, though, I hope that it isn't to make a profit, but rather to cover the costs of making it and distributing it via Xbox Live.

If a BOINC download for the Xbox 360 had to be free, I think that it would still be worth the effort. There are millions of Xbox 360's out there, many connected to the Internet via Xbox Live. The 360 is powerful, and it could easily implement things like Credits and Teams because Xbox Live has clans anyway. Maybe you could even link your Xbox 360 BOINC account to your computer's BOINC account as well.

I don't know if it costs money for the developer to have a download available, but there is a free plug-in that allows for AAC playback with an iPod, and that's made by a third-party company, and they're not making any money off of it (unless Microsoft is paying them or something).

Of course, a GUI would have to be developed that would be much more user-friendly than that of computers, and would have to have its own menu and area of the Xbox 360 Dashboard. It would also probably have to include a way to throttle CPU power and turn off the 360 after a specified number of hours to avoid it overheating.

SETI@home and eventually BOINC were built to utilize all of the untapped computing resources just sitting there across cyberspace, in the form of PC's. Now, there is another source for a massive amount of computing resources: video game consoles connected to the Internet, in the form of Xbox 360's, and later, PS3's. They are just sitting there for most of the time, probably more than PC's.

BOINC can not be sold to anyone due to its licence I think?

Also its next to impossible/too much work to convert a 360 to a Linux operating system to enable this to happen.

So short answer is no as its not worth the effort

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And BOINC is only a small part of it. You also need a science application written to run on it.

I thought that all versions of BOINC are the same, and a science application designed for a Mac BOINC would work with a Windows BOINC since they are designed to do the same things. If different versions of BOINC are different, and one application would work with a Windows BOINC, but not a Mac BOINC, then I guess that you're right, that it wouldn't be worth the effort.

BOINC can not be sold to anyone due to its licence I think?

Also its next to impossible/too much work to convert a 360 to a Linux operating system to enable this to happen.

So short answer is no as its not worth the effort

Here is an article that might answer why.
X BOX Article

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Crunching for SCIENCE not CREDITS.

thermal issues have been worked out with the 360 aka dont put it in a closed cabinet : ) The 360 has huge processing potential and I would donate $ just to make one. the PS3 does folding at home and I wish there was some computig I could do with my 360.

Microsoft has the xbox360 completely locked up to avoid 3rd party apps (that means a different OS and/or BOINC) to run on it. You won't be seeing BOINC on it any time soon.

there was some movement at rosetta with MS regarding the 360 but nothing came of it. I would suspect the reason for this is the overheating issue, even though the newer ones with the better heatsinks and smaller process tech would probably be fine, MS wouldn't want it running on the older ones, a proportion of which are quite likely to overheat if running flat out (especially if the xenos GPU is working as well as the xenon CPU)...

It would be great to be able to get them crunching though. I've been keeping my eye on free60.org since the 360 came out and they do have a linux boot image available for certain kernel versions. I don't know if anyone's tried the PPC version of BOINC on that though?

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