BOINC and SETI@Home Data Output with Conky

Mar 11

BOINC and SETI@Home Data Output with Conky

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BOINC Statistics output to Conky Since my previous article about Conky, Conky on Ubunty 64 Bit - .conkyrc, I’ve been playing around with trying to get Conky to output some BOINC (SETI@Home data), and through a little digging, found a couple of very useful resources. The first being BOINC’s own client_status.xml file, located on Ubunutu in /var/lib/boinc-client/client_status.xml, which contains a lot of information about BOINC projects, Work Units, Status and so on. The second being a command line application, again built into BOINC - boinc_cmd. boinc_cmd can be executed with a bunch of parameters, such as –get_simple_gui_info and –get_project_status which output to the Terminal a lot of information about Projects and Work Units.

To output BOINC data via Conky, it’s possible to call the boinc_cmd in .conkyrc and strip down the information with grep and sed etc:

${execi 10 boinc_cmd --get_simple_gui_info | grep -m 1 "fraction done:" | tail -n 1 - | sed -e 's/ fraction done: //'} ${execi 10 boinc_cmd --get_simple_gui_info | grep -m 2 "fraction done:" | tail -n 1 - | sed -e 's/ fraction done: //'}

…and so on for each piece of data required for output, but this is pretty labourious, and makes for a rather ugly .conkyrc, so I’ve written a really quick and dirty Perl Script (it’s not pleasant to look at, and needs a LOT of work, so it’s more of a pre Alpha-Alpha! I’m not sure how, or if it will work with multiple projects, since I only have SETI@HOME installed…) - which actually retrieves all the data from the client_status.xml file. The (archived) script, boinc.pl can be downloaded here (and viewed below - just copy and paste the text into a file, and save it as “boinc.pl” if the download doesn’t work for you). It’s also posted over at the Ubuntu Forums. I’ve called it in .conkyrc by adding one simple line:

BOINC: ${color lightgrey}${execi 10 perl ~/ConkyScripts/boinc/boinc.pl}

OK, so that’s actually two lines, but the first line doesn’t really do anything except output the text “BOINC:” to Conky, so it doesn’t count - but it’s much cleaner than potentially dozens of lines, right? The script itself is in my ~/ConkyScripts/boinc directory and has been made executable:

sudo chmod a+x boinc.pl

Here’s the script so far - it’s VERY much Work In Progress, but it outputs the data as shown in the image above:

Edit 15/03/08: I’ve updated the code, so hopefully it’ll work with multiple projects:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$BoincStatePath="/var/lib/boinc-client";
$BoincClientStateFile="client_state.xml";
$StateFile="$BoincStatePath/$BoincClientStateFile";

open(INFO, $StateFile);
@lines = <INFO>;
close(INFO);
sub strip_tags($);

sub convert_time_to_string($);
sub estimate_time_remaining;
$projectCount = 0;
$wuCount = 0;
$wuActive = 0;
$wuActiveTask = 0;

foreach $line (@lines) {

   if ($line =~ /<master_url>/) {
      $projectMasterURL[$projectCount] = strip_tags($line);
   }

   if ($line =~ /<project_name>/) {
      $projectName[$projectCount] = strip_tags($line);
      $projectCount++;
   }

   if ($line =~ /<workunit>/) {
      $wuCount++;
   }

   if ($line =~ /<active_task_state>1/) {
      $wuActive++;
   }

   if ($line =~ /<active_task>/) {
      $wuActiveTask++;
   }

   if ($line =~ /<result_name>/) {
      $wuName[$wuActiveTask] = strip_tags($line);
   }

   if ($line =~ /<fraction_done>/) {
      $wuPercent[$wuActiveTask] = strip_tags($line) * 100;
   }

   if ($line =~ /<project_master_url>/) {
      $wuMasterURL[$wuActiveTask] = strip_tags($line);
   }

   if ($line =~ /<current_cpu_time>/) {
      $wuCPUTime[$wuActiveTask] = convert_time_to_string(strip_tags($line));
      $wuCPUTimeRaw[$wuActiveTask] = strip_tags($line);
   }

}

print "No. Work Units: ".$wuCount.", Active WU: ".$wuActive."\n";

for($i = 0; $i <= $projectCount; ++$i) {
   print $projectName[$i];
   for ($j = 1; $j <= $wuActiveTask; ++$j) {
      if($projectMasterURL[$i] eq $wuMasterURL[$j]) {
         print "WU ".$j.": ".$wuName[$j];
         $estTime = convert_time_to_string(estimate_time_remaining($wuCPUTimeRaw[$j],$wuPercent[$j]));
         print "CPU Time: ".$wuCPUTime[$j]." Time Remaining: ".$estTime."\n";
         print $wuPercent[$j]."% Complete\n";
      }
   }
}

sub strip_tags($) {
   my $string = shift;
   $string =~ s/<(.*?)>//gi;
   $string =~ s/ //gi;
   return $string;
}

sub convert_time_to_string($) {
   $cpuTime = int($_[0]);
   #Calculate the number of days
   if ($cpuTime > 86400) {
      $timeDays = $cpuTime/(24*60*60).":";
   } else {
      $timeDays = "";
   }

   #Calculate the number of hours and minutes
   $timeHours = ($cpuTime/(60*60))%24;
   $timeMinutes = ($cpuTime/60)%60;
   $timeSeconds = $cpuTime%60;
   $cpuTimeString = $timeDays.$timeHours.":".$timeMinutes.":".$timeSeconds;

   return $cpuTimeString;
}

sub estimate_time_remaining {
   $cpuTime = $_[0];
   $currentPercent = $_[1];
   $onePercentTime = $cpuTime/$currentPercent;
   $totalTime = $onePercentTime * 100;
   $estimatedTimeReminaing = $totalTime - $cpuTime;
   return $estimatedTimeReminaing;
}

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written by Hodge \\ tags: BOINC, Conky, conkyrc, SETI, SETI@Home, Ubuntu

5 Responses to “BOINC and SETI@Home Data Output with Conky”

Revenant Says:
March 13th, 2008 at 3:23 am
Okay, first off, great script. Just thought you might like to know its behavior when you have multiple projects running. It works, and shows all running WUs, however the project name field is taken by whichever project is last in the client_state file. Thanks for the script (its a heck of a lot more then I could have done)
Revenant Says:
March 15th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
The update is PERFECT! Thank you very much, having conky monitor BOINC is a lot more convenient than keeping BOINC manager open.
Hodge Says:
March 16th, 2008 at 4:18 am
Thanks for the feedback Revenant - I’m glad it helped you out!
Conky on Ubuntu 64 Bit - .conkyrc | 64 Bit Jungle Says:
March 19th, 2008 at 4:52 am
[...] I’ve also recently written a Perl script, which allows BOINC data to be viewed via Conky. See my recent post on BOINC and SETI@Home with Conky, on Ubuntu. [...]
cam217 Says:
May 25th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Hello,

Great idea, I posted suggestions on ubuntu forums. Take a look at it
Thanks for your work anyway.