I hope that someone can help me with a MilkyWay@home computing problem.

I recently (re-)joined BOINC, and began computing for MilkyWay@home. Neither of my computers has run any BOINC software before, and I installed it on them within the last month. So there isn't any old software to get in the way.

One of my computers happily processes Separation tasks. Another one has been assigned a mix of Separation and N-Body tasks. It completes N-Body tasks without problems, but on the Separation tasks it always suffers an "Error while computing."

When it has that error, the stderr output includes these messages (this output is from task 210145074):
Error loading Lua script 'astronomy_parameters.txt': [string "number_parameters: 4..."]:1: '<name>' expected near '4'
Switching to Parameter File 'astronomy_parameters.txt'
<number_WUs> 4 </number_WUs>
<number_params_per_WU> 26 </number_params_per_WU>
stream sigma 0.0 is invalid
Failed to get stream constants

That computer is a VM (VirtualBox) running Ubuntu 12.

What can I do to resolve this problem?

The Lua error is nothing to worry about. Everybody gets this in every task. The can't get stream constants is your problem. I would expect that the VM is not allowing the gpu compute to be used.

---

Thanks Keith.
This computer doesn't have a GPU (or doesn't have a GPU worth using).
Is there a way that I can tell it to not try to access a GPU, so that it doesn't fail?

With your computers hidden it is hard to tell what computer you are referencing. I would first turn off using any gpu in your account MilkyWay Preferences. Then I would turn off the Separation project, but since the server code was updated, the MikyWay project selections have gone missing. You used to be able to select which projects you wanted to run. Now you can't. You get everything.

Hopefully disabling the gpu will prevent getting anymore Separation run gpu tasks.

---

The only one of my computers running BOINC that has a GPU recognized by the BOINC manager is my MacBook Air. The BOINC manager pulldown menus offer three choices of GPU settings: Use GPU Always, Suspend GPU, and Use GPU Based on Preferences.

But on the computer with the problem described above, the BOINC manager doesn't recognize a GPU, and those 3 choices don''t appear. I don't see any similar controls in the web preferences or in the preferences on individual computers.

As you noticed, it is no longer possible to disable the Separation project.

Your last sentence makes me wonder if there are separate tasks for GPUs and tasks for computers without GPUs. Is that true?

Also, are there any other configuration options that I might use to enable that computer to run Separation tasks?

Thanks for your help!