Azure has a $200 free credit promotion for signing up. By my calculations, that's enough to run a Basic A4 Virtual Machine (8 cores) for a month (or two of them for 15 days).
1. Go to
http://azure.microsoft.com/
2. Select "Free Trial"
3. Sign in with your Outlook/Hotmail account or create one.
4. Fill in your data. MS will ask for a CC and charge $1 for verification. You need to provide a mobile number as the verification code is received by SMS.
5. Go to the Azure portal (from
http://azure.microsoft.com/ click on "Portal" on the top right corner)
6. Select click on the "+ New" at the bottom bar, then "Virtual Machine", then "Fast setup"
7. Input your desired server name, URL will be servername.cloudapp.net, your username and password.
8. Select the size and OS for the server. The credit is enough to run a Basic A4 (8 cores) instance for a month. I'd recommend you to chose Ubuntu 12.04.
9. Create the virtual machine and wait for it to be available (5 minutes or so).
10. In the mean time download Putty:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
The putty-0.63-installer.exe has everything you'd need.
11. Open putty and input the server URL (servername.cloudapp.net) and click Open.
12. Putty is connected and will ask for a user name, "azureuser" is the user for SHH connections, the password will be whatever you put in the setup.
13. Now that you're logged in, run "sudo apt-get update"
14. Install boinc with "sudo apt-get install boinc-client boinc-manager", confirm when it asks about having to use 374MB of storage.
15. Once that boinc is installed, attach to a project by running "boinccmd --project_attach
http://www.worldcommunitygird.org your-account-key"
The WCG account key can be found on your WCG PROFILE page, NOT in your contribution page.
16. Run "boinccmd --set_run_mode always" and "boinccmd --set_network_mode always", the buffer size must be managed by changing the device profile on the WCG page.
17. Run "exit" to log out and close Putty
18. For good measure, reboot the VM from the Azure panel to make sure that boinc is running as a daemon (auto start up). Log in again with putty and run "boinccmd --get_state" to show all the WUs running.
Enjoy your free PPD. Just make sure to delete the VM when you have 1 or so days left. To stop boinc from getting new work you can run "boinccmd --project
http://www.worldcommunitygird.org nomorework"
edit: You can see how much credit you have left on the Azure portal:
Oh, and your credit is valid for 30 days only and the most cores you can use are 20.