Posted 828 days ago by
Paul D. Buck
BOINC 6.10.58 would be a downgrade.
Actually, 6.10.58 would be an upgrade. You would be upgrading from a BETA version to a stable RELEASED version.
Most of us that test the later versions of BOINC *NEVER* suggest trying a version that we ourselves have not been running... usually for some considerable time. I personally also watch the change logs carefully to see what changes have been made and how radical of a shift there has been...
There things to dislike about the 6.12.x series like the hiding of the event log and the order of the columns are not what I would choose ... but, though Beta, the push is on to make one of these the next stable. 6.12.13 has only minor tweaks from 6.12.12 like removing the URL change from notices because of a suggestion I made ...
But, the biggest change is to get rid of strict FIFO which should not have been allowed to persist as long as it did ... if you were single project it mattered little, but if you did multiple projects it was a real bad thing ...
Lastly, even the "stable" release versions have their issues ... just not usually big enough that most people notice...
Posted 830 days ago by
Paul D. Buck
When that runs out, it gets work from a backup project. Hours and hours of work (much more than my set preferences suggest, for some reason). While this lot is worked on, new MW WUs usually trickle in after a few minutes, just sitting there getting older before BOINC is done with the other project's work. (This FIFO behaviour might change in a future release of the BOINC core client.)
FIFO for the GPU is finally gone in the 6.12.x series...
Posted 833 days ago by
Paul D. Buck
Does not obey TDI parameters at all. I have my general and local preferences to switch projects every 5 minutes. 6.10.58 would never obey my rules.
Switching projects every 5 minutes is not a good idea. Unless all projects you are running have tasks less than the TSI, well, you are just thrashing.TSI at default allows most projects to get a shot of CPU and to complete a reasonable amount of work before a switch.
On mutli-core systems, particularly with 8 or more cores a far better strategy is to extend TSI out so that most tasks complete beffore the TSI expires (mine is set to 720 min, 6 hours). There are a host of issues with honoring TSI on GPU projects where the tasks are longer than 5 minutes in that you will waste considerable time unloading the GPU and loading it with the next task and rinse and repeat...
Posted 850 days ago by
Paul D. Buck
Hi there,
I wondered if anyone could help? I'm using my GPU to crunch Milkyway (when the computer has not been used for two minutes) and all is fine except when I start using it again the crunching stops as per instructions, but when it starts again any computation is lost and time elapsed and progress reverts to zero. I'm sure that in the past this wasn't the case or am I imagining that?
Have just replaced my GTX 295 with a GTX 580...wow!!!!
Because of the short run times, minutes only, MW on the GPU does not checkpoint. So, yes, all the work done in lost. But, by not checkpointing, more work is actually done over the long haul because of the time saved avoiding wasteful disk writes...
Posted 997 days ago by
Paul D. Buck
Checkpoint: tnow = 0.550334. time since last = 686193s
Checkpoint: tnow = 0.429749. time since last = 686747s
These don't mean anything. It's just from subtracting an arbitrary time from 0.0 when the first checkpoint happens (which I added here http://github.com/Milkyway-at-home/milkywayathome_client/commit/b8ea7ee37035eb2e69403cc8c4767f7a58111c54). It's just debug printing since it seems like on some systems the checkpointing is happening way too often. The BOINC default time is supposedly 300 seconds, but most systems seem to do it around 60 seconds. A fair number also seem to be checkpointing every 10 seconds for some reason, which is helping slow things down and might partially explains some of the maximum time exceeded errors.
They have made changes in the checkpointing... I forget which version... somewhere in the 3 or 4 series the number of CPUs was taken into account because people were setting it to a value and because of the multiple CPUs the setting was effectively divided by that count... so if you set 4 minutes on an 8 CPU system the effective checkpointing interval was 30 seconds ...
Recently, ( and I don't recall how recently ) the multiplier was removed so we are back to much more rapid CKPTs than most expect... especially on GPU equipped systems (which add processing elements and tasks in work)...
Posted 1075 days ago by
Paul D. Buck
Go to http://boinc.thesonntags.com/collatz/prefs.php?subset=global and change the suspend if CPU option to "0"
I made the change, but still get this message:
6/7/2010 8:24:34 PM suspend work if non-BOINC CPU load exceeds 25 %
If you have used local manager preferences then the web preferences will be overridden. You will need to clear them for the web preferences to take or make the change in the manager.
I assume this under Advanced>Preferences>CPU Usage? If so, the answer is yes. Nothing worked, which is why I posted the question here, then I followed up on changing preferences via the web settings.
If you made any setting, or even clicked Ok on that pane, you are now using LOCAL preferences and no change you make with the web site will be honored. You have to open the preferences pane and click on the 'Clear' button, and click 'Yes' on the confirm ... this is one of the long-standing GUI issues where there is no clear indication of when you are using local preferences ... what you should see is some clear indication that you are on local settings or web settings ... but, until that is done, the only way to be sure is to clear the local preferences ...
Oh, and you should force an update to the last project for which you have changed the settings to be sure that they have been updated ...
Posted 1081 days ago by
Paul D. Buck
Where's the 64 bit of this version of BOINC?
All Versions List contains all the versions sorted most recent on top.
Note that the latest recommended is 6.10.56 not .57 ...
Posted 1081 days ago by
Paul D. Buck
From the Boinc Download page:
Attach to projects with GPU applications
Projects with NVIDIA applications:
GPUgrid.net
SETI@home
Milkyway@home (Double precision GPU required)
AQUA@home (cuda offline)
Lattice
Collatz Conjecture
PrimeGrid (AP26)
Projects with ATI applications:
Collatz Conjecture
Milkyway@home (Double precision GPU required)
DNETC@Home
You're done! Soon you'll be racking up big credit numbers. Of course, you can attach to other projects too; BOINC will keep both your CPU and GPU busy.
I have seen posts from people with macs running ATI cards as coprocessors. It is just not working with Snow Leopard as far as I can tell.
I just double checked and none of the three projects listed in your message that has an ATI application has one for the Mac. These projects do have an ATI application for Windows, and in some cases also for Linux, but no one has an ATI application running on OS-X ... MW and Collatz can run on the Mac on the CPU side and there is the one CUDA application from Collatz that runs only on the GPU and the Einstein beta application that runs on the CPU and GPU ... AND THAT IS IT ...
Developers target Windows first, Linux second and the Mac third ... DENETC at the moment is windows only (ATI, CUDA, and CPU) ... likely the next applications will be made available on Linux and only later can we expect to see a Mac version...
The project with the widest applicability is Collatz... And I would look to them to be the first out with an application for the ATI cards on the Mac if anyone does it ... then likely MW ... but the limitation is that ATI has not released the right drivers yet for the Mac platform and until they do, nothing is going to happen ...
Posted 1082 days ago by
Paul D. Buck
Ah, thanks Paul.
I may try going through BAM again to override the settings there, or turning the cache back on so I have some stored up WU's for those times where MW and Seti are having issues.
Been getting a lot of project has no work when requesting GPU tasks from both of em in the past 5 days or so.
Sadly BOIC does not actually fare well running for long periods of time on the server side... UCB has also shown no interest in finding out why this problem set exists as well ... though many of us are pretty familiar with some of the symptoms ... one of the more common ones is loss of connection to the database ...
Three day weekends seems to be a particular hazard. At least a half a dozen projects flipped out ... including Einstein which is one of the most reliable ones going ... I was just glad I was able to keep all the GPUs running most of the days, on one project if not another ... because I did a lot of Collatz instead of DNETC or MW my daily total this morning stunk big time ... but, likely I will get it back tomorrow and the next day as I turn back to mostly MW now (assuming I can get the work) ...
Posted 1082 days ago by
Paul D. Buck
I have moved cuda out of the way in /usr/local
Now I get:
Mon 31 May 12:16:58 2010 No NVIDIA library found
Mon 31 May 12:16:58 2010 No usable GPUs found
Guess I need to point it towards OpenCL or ATI stream?
Alan
Alan,
For the Mac there is nothing for users with ATI cards from any project that I know of... if you have a CUDA card and do the work you can get work from Collatz (Pure GPU) and EaH (50/50) ... sadly the PG project that also had a CUDA app for the mac (though it made for lots of lag) completed and they have not ported another application to GPU for any platform ...
As usual, in many respects, the Mac world lags the Linux and Windows worlds ...
If I were to guess if there would be a project that will release a Mac application for GPUs (though likely CUDA at first) it would be DNETC ...