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actualfactual

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Message 64314 - Posted: 7 Feb 2016, 3:13:05 UTC

Hey everyone,

I just moved all of my old hardware into a spare case I had laying around to turn into a 24 hour BOINC box. I had two 280X's that I threw in there and decided for simplicity's sake that I'd just go for Linux since I know that MilkyWay and most other BOINC projects are compatible with it.

The long short of things is that I can get just about anything else to run right now except for MilkyWay :( The manager keeps showing notices that the files for the applications can't be found based on the info I put in the app_info.xml. I edited and re-edited that file many times based off of solutions in other threads but I still can't seem to get any MW activity going.

Any suggestions? All help is much appreciated! :)
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actualfactual

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Message 64315 - Posted: 7 Feb 2016, 3:47:31 UTC

Scratch that. Turns out I had the milkyway package installed when I didn't need it. After I uninstalled that, BOINC downloaded the applications like it was supposed to, but now a new issue has arisen...

The manager downloads all available WU's and then they all abort at once. Anything else I should be looking for?
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europa

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Message 64327 - Posted: 8 Feb 2016, 14:33:20 UTC - in response to Message 64315.  

I'm running all my machines under Linux Mint 17.3. Three boxes are Nvidia and one is ATI.

In the past, people would use an app_info.xml file to customize the running of multiple simultaneous GPU WU's, for example. They could get pretty convoluted and I'm no programmer.

A couple of years back there was some movement to the simpler app_config.xml format and I've gone that route with my machines with no problems.

Here's mine for MW:
<app_config>

<app>
<name>milkyway</name>
<max_concurrent>8</max_concurrent>
<gpu_versions>
<gpu_usage>.5</gpu_usage>
<cpu_usage>.05</cpu_usage>
</gpu_versions>
</app>

<app>
<name>milkyway_separation__modified_fit</name>
<max_concurrent>8</max_concurrent>
<gpu_versions>
<gpu_usage>.5</gpu_usage>
<cpu_usage>.05</cpu_usage>
</gpu_versions>
</app>

</app_config>

Another thing to check is the cc_config.xml since that's where you tell it to use all GPU's. Boinc defaults to no GPUs.

Here's mine:
<cc_config>
<options>
<use_all_gpus>1</use_all_gpus>
<save_stats_days>180</save_stats_days>
<max_file_xfers>48</max_file_xfers>
<max_file_xfers_per_project>36</max_file_xfers_per_project>
</options>
<log_flags>
<task>1</task>
<file_xfer>1</file_xfer>
<sched_ops>1</sched_ops>
</log_flags>
</cc_config>

Finally, sometimes I've found it necessary to do the following in the terminal:

xhost +

and then:

sudo service boinc-client restart

I don't know if any of this will help. Sometimes I feel like I'm just doing the digital version of uttering incantations and shaking rattles!! :)

Regards,
Steve
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alanb1951

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Message 64328 - Posted: 9 Feb 2016, 9:50:13 UTC

Just to add an observation on BOINC restarts to europa's advice...

I'm running MW@Home on XUbuntu with an AMD card, and I soon discovered that if I don't take certain precautions before a BOINC restart (after reboot or similar) I'd start losing jobs to "Missing co-processor" the same as you have been doing.

Firstly, I always suspend BOINC projects before planned restarts. I also run some non-GPU projects, and I tend to make sure they have checkpointed recently beforehand... This way I don't have any running jobs or candidates to lose on a restart!

After a reboot, current BOINC versions don't seem to be able to pick up most OpenCL devices without a functional X session and relevant access. I use

sudo xhost SI:localhost:boinc
sudo service boinc-client restart

to deal with this (that xhost command doesn't open up the X session quite as much as the xhost + in europa's post, if you're bothered by that...)

By the way, anything that kills the X session can cause it to lose track of the device(s) - this can include logging out(!) as well as crashes (so I just lock my screen if I'm not powering off...) I also had to stop XUbuntu from using the lightlocker screen saver because it seems to suspend the X session (which also suspended any GPU apps!), so I uninstalled that and use the old xscreensaver. Of course, the latter may not be relevant in your case...

However you end up doing so, I hope you manage to get it sorted.

Good luck - Al.
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Message boards : Number crunching : Issues With Milkyway & Linux

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