If you are not running an optimised app you really are "cutting your nose off to spite your face".

Even when there isn't one available for your platform?

Or for those of us not computer literate enough to have any idea of what you are talking about...

If there is no optimised app available for your platform, and you can't return work within the time frames set by the project then my comment below, "And when a GPU can do the same wu in minutes, I don't think any project would care if a few very slow hosts that take days were dropped. It is but a fact of life.", stands.

The technology race marches on. The needs of the project change over time and older hardware gets left behind. Such is life. I overcame that by purchasing a 3850 card for the AGP slot in my 3.0GHz P4. But some will still have the same problem regarding available apps for their platform. Maybe you could ask Gipsel to do you one....or just find a project that suits your aging hardware.

Or for those of us not computer literate enough to have any idea of what you are talking about...

Matt, your 3.4GHz P4 is SSE3 capable. If you go to the following web site http://www.arkayn.us/milkyway/index.html you will find links to SSE2 and SSE3 optimised applications in the top line. Download either one as there is no real difference in speed between SSE2 and SSE3.

If you are using the default install locations and haven't changed them, then stop BOINC and extract the files to

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\BOINC\projects\milkyway.cs.rpi.edu_milkyway

then restart BOINC.

You will be amazed at the speed up compared to the stock project application.

The technology race marches on. The needs of the project change over time and older hardware gets left behind. Such is life. I overcame that by purchasing a 3850 card for the AGP slot in my 3.0GHz P4. But some will still have the same problem regarding available apps for their platform. Maybe you could ask Gipsel to do you one....or just find a project that suits your aging hardware.

Currently crunching the Winter Solstice challenge at Primegrid with my aging IBM ppc64 at the moment. Einstein's new app won't compile for me, so I'll be moving to Enigma after that. The machine is running as an mp3 server 24 hours a day, it might as well be doing something the 98% of the time it's inactive. Some projects are easier to compile than others and Milkyway just happens to be one of the easy ones to compile. Pirates is easy to compile, too, if they would just put out a steady stream of work. I can only crunch the projects with source code because I always have to compile my own.

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6r39 7ri99

Beware the dual headed Gentoo with Wine!

Or for those of us not computer literate enough to have any idea of what you are talking about...

Matt, your 3.4GHz P4 is SSE3 capable. If you go to the following web site http://www.arkayn.us/milkyway/index.html you will find links to SSE2 and SSE3 optimised applications in the top line. Download either one as there is no real difference in speed between SSE2 and SSE3.

If you are using the default install locations and haven't changed them, then stop BOINC and extract the files to

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\BOINC\projects\milkyway.cs.rpi.edu_milkyway

then restart BOINC.

You will be amazed at the speed up compared to the stock project application.

OK I've tried that, no new project yet to see. Up until a couple weeks ago it was finishing with plenty of time.

I am definitely going to run into a deadline problem as my PSU on my tower gave up the ghost on me.

Hopefully I will get a new one by Tuesday or Wednesday and get back up and crunching MW.

For now I had to move the Dell into the bedroom so I had something to game on.

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I had a go at running a MW on a small netbook with an Intel Atom with processor capability to run two WU's at once. It seems it will take around 30 hours to complete them. This is OK for the 2 or 3 days given to complete, but not practical for me since this is not a 24/7 hour device; it's just turned on occassionally when needed.

It probably also depends on what is done with the netbook, ie, does it do BOINC and nothing ele. This is not the case for this netbook and unfortunately it looks like MW is not the appropriate project for this device (which it may have been when the WUs were much smaller).

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Thing is the very idea of BOINC is for people to be able to help science through running it it the background while doing other things/while computer is not being used. Not to have a computer dedicated to just running boinc projects.

This particular Boinc project has short 3 day turnround times for reasons that have been stated many times before elsewhere. It is the way things are here, but there are other just as worthy Boinc projects that don't need such stringent timescales. They may be more suitable for slower machines or those which are not on 24/7.

Things have moved on from 10 years ago when people were using PIII's and early P4's, and utilising unused CPU cycles in the background. During that time a whole new breed of cruncher has evolved that use middle to top end kit 24/7, not to mention the fairly recent introduction of GPU work. You can't blame the projects for wanting to take advantage of this uprated resource.

But, having said that, they should not forget the middle of the road crunchers that make up the majority of Boinc users. Have a look here and see which processors are the most common.

Processors

Then here to see the top performers.

Performers

I would like to see all Boinc projects taking a two tier approach, of offering work which is suitable for the majority of peoples kit, alongside enhanced work for those that have top end cpus's and Gpu's. These days all new kit comes with at least a decent dual core CPU, and I foresee the day when top end P4's just won't hack it any more.

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Don't drink water, that's the stuff that rusts pipes

I was and am a strong advocate of making the tasks longer, but primarily for GPU users. As best as I understand things, the scientists working on this project had to intentionally not run tasks that are of the 1-stream or 2-stream variety because they would not run for long enough so that the systems out here pounded on the server causing many problems, such as slow web site performance and, ironically, work outages.

As I said somewhere over the past few weeks, I knew that when task runtimes were increased for everyone, this kind of complaint would crop up. The way to deal with this to please more people is to find a way to send these longer-running 3-stream tasks (tasks that have 3s in their name) to GPU users, and then let the scientists generate 1 and 2-stream tasks again and direct those to CPU users.

Another small thing that could be done is if the 5-10% performance improvement in the CUDA code that was changed recently makes any difference at all to CPU processing times, a new stock and 3rd-party optimized application could be made for CPU processing.

The best thing though is to try to segregate the tasks...

Another small thing that could be done is if the 5-10% performance improvement in the CUDA code that was changed recently makes any difference at all to CPU processing times, a new stock and 3rd-party optimized application could be made for CPU processing.

Those changes are only applicable to the GPU versions. It should be the last two in the set of optimizations mentioned in the PPAM publication linked on the front page. They are already in the ATI version starting with version 0.20.

Another small thing that could be done is if the 5-10% performance improvement in the CUDA code that was changed recently makes any difference at all to CPU processing times, a new stock and 3rd-party optimized application could be made for CPU processing.

Those changes are only applicable to the GPU versions. It should be the last two in the set of optimizations mentioned in the PPAM publication linked on the front page. They are already in the ATI version starting with version 0.20.

OK... I didn't think there was going to be any benefit for CPU processing, but didn't know for sure...

At any rate, GPUs need longer running tasks, but not CPUs. It would be best if they could distribute the longer tasks to GPUs and start up the shorter-running searches that the scientists were told not to run and send those to CPU users. If not, then the project will probably need to do some PSAs and/or other ways to educate users on why the deadlines are what they are and why they really cannot be changed.

I am definitely going to run into a deadline problem as my PSU on my tower gave up the ghost on me.

Hopefully I will get a new one by Tuesday or Wednesday and get back up and crunching MW.

For now I had to move the Dell into the bedroom so I had something to game on.

And back up and running with a new PSU, yes all 24 units were timed out.

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I downloaded that SSE 3 thing and it's still not enough time. Is there a way to set it to not get such huge WU's?

Sadly no :(

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Well, I aborted everything and have it set not to get new wu's from milky way. If they want it set that only rich people who have advanced computers and/or can afford an extra computer to just run BOINC then the hell with them for being so elitist. I'll keep my spare computing power for cosmology, climate prediction, World Community Grid and the LHC project (if lhc ever gives any wu's) or maybe join a new one. If they decide to let normal people participate again maybe I'll come back.

Well, I aborted everything and have it set not to get new wu's from milky way. If they want it set that only rich people who have advanced computers and/or can afford an extra computer to just run BOINC then the hell with them for being so elitist. I'll keep my spare computing power for cosmology, climate prediction, World Community Grid and the LHC project (if lhc ever gives any wu's) or maybe join a new one. If they decide to let normal people participate again maybe I'll come back.

Don't know what your problem is except wanting to complain. My P4 is only 2.66, so it is older than yours. I have no problem doing these tasks. Heck at times early on they were over 10 hours.

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Doesn't expecting the unexpected make the unexpected the expected?
If it makes sense, DON'T do it.

Whats driving me crazy is WU's take 5 hrs on my machine, deadline in 2 1/2 days and they all run high priority.

I run 50% Seti, 50% Milkyway, and anytime I run Milkyway, its high priority. I even have a Milky way WU due on 1/4/2010 and its running high priority. Guess I'll live.

Sincerely,
Daysteppr

Well, I aborted everything and have it set not to get new wu's from milky way. If they want it set that only rich people who have advanced computers and/or can afford an extra computer to just run BOINC then the hell with them for being so elitist. I'll keep my spare computing power for cosmology, climate prediction, World Community Grid and the LHC project (if lhc ever gives any wu's) or maybe join a new one. If they decide to let normal people participate again maybe I'll come back.

Don't know what your problem is except wanting to complain. My P4 is only 2.66, so it is older than yours. I have no problem doing these tasks. Heck at times early on they were over 10 hours.

These complaints arise any time a project has a short/tight deadline and the person does not have the computer on enough and/or is running several other projects.

On the one hand, we had the people with fast GPUs howling about things. On the other, we now have people on the other end of the spectrum howling about things. Unless the 1-stream and 2-stream work is of no use to the project anymore, they could address some of the complaining by sending the 3-stream tasks to GPU users and the 1-stream and 2-stream tasks to CPU users. I would think that if the server code is updated for native GPU support, that kind of "homogeneous redundancy"-ish kind of setup should be doable...