Ook, where to start.

I'm running Vista64bit, Boinc version 6.4.7, catalsyt 9.2. Trying to get the GPU version 19e running. I have edited the system 32 folder to what is saying in the read me file. I haven't altered the app_info.xml file just inserted it. Machine runs fine for a few hours but when I go back the units are just hanging. Other projects are running fine but milkyway seems to have just frozen.

Any clues to what I have done wrong please. Thanks for reading.


I have tried going to Catalyst 8.12 as I read that sometimes this is the only one that can work on some boxes.

i left it at 9.1 but took your advice of upping the fan speed. that's brought it down from ~83c to ~77c.

and it made it through the night without locking up. So it could be that it was overheating. But I had also upgraded to version .19. So, was there a change in there that corrected the problem?

either way, v.19 is working fine on an i7 and hd4870 with 512m

Besides the CPU detection nothing changed between 0.17 and 0.19. So maybe really a temperature problem.

But I have seen your crunch times are slightly on the high side. This could be caused by running too many WUs concurrently on the GPU. At a certain point the RAM on the graphics card is not sufficient for the number of WUs taking space there. Before it errors out (when even more WUs would be crunched), it slows down (probably some swapping over PCI-Express happens). And with 16 WUs it is getting already a bit crowded on a 512MB card.
Another reason for the higher times could be that the card runs downclocked in a power saving mode. Maybe you should check the clock speed of the card.

Furthermore you may think about attaching to a second BOINC project with that i7. This will reduce the number of MW WUs that are running a he same time, but not the throughput. You will still finish the same number of WUs per hour even with less concurrently running WUs. In fact, it could even rise in your case. Furthermore your CPU cores wouldn't be idling that much ;)

i left it at 9.1 but took your advice of upping the fan speed. that's brought it down from ~83c to ~77c.

and it made it through the night without locking up. So it could be that it was overheating. But I had also upgraded to version .19. So, was there a change in there that corrected the problem?

either way, v.19 is working fine on an i7 and hd4870 with 512m

Besides the CPU detection nothing changed between 0.17 and 0.19. So maybe really a temperature problem.

But I have seen your crunch times are slightly on the high side. This could be caused by running too many WUs concurrently on the GPU. At a certain point the RAM on the graphics card is not sufficient for the number of WUs taking space there. Before it errors out (when even more WUs would be crunched), it slows down (probably some swapping over PCI-Express happens). And with 16 WUs it is getting already a bit crowded on a 512MB card.
Another reason for the higher times could be that the card runs downclocked in a power saving mode. Maybe you should check the clock speed of the card.

Furthermore you may think about attaching to a second BOINC project with that i7. This will reduce the number of MW WUs that are running a he same time, but not the throughput. You will still finish the same number of WUs per hour even with less concurrently running WUs. In fact, it could even rise in your case. Furthermore your CPU cores wouldn't be idling that much ;)

I suggest you rollback to 8.9 and see how it goes.

EDIT: Oh! Another thing. Monitor your temperatures on your GPU while crunching if you can. I had to increase the fan speed on my 4850 to 50% because I was afraid that 85C was a bit much. Even this slight increase from 30 to 50% cooled the card all the way down to 63C stable.

I upped the limit to 5000, its probably not enough :P Didn't want to jump all the way to 10k and have craziness start happening.

You don't need to raise it until the multiple GPU support is working. 10,000 WUs a day on a dual core are just enough for a HD4870 at stock speed.

You know... I think it's ok now... I think it was just a problem of 8 tasks starting and finishing in unison. Now that they've sort of become staggared, things are running smoothly and my CPU is keeping busy. Times look to be between 6 and 9 minutes per WU now.

Cool. I'll let it run and see how it does...

With the gpu, I can crunch 16 @ a time with the i7, so 10k limit per core, or 80,000 in my case, would be a more realistic than 4000.

But the throughput is still be one WU every 9 seconds or so with a HD4870. It is not getting faster with more concurrent WUs. So with a HD4870 a limit of 10,000 WUs a day would be enough as long there is no multi GPU support implemented (or massive overclocking involved).

I would say 10,000 WUs per host and day are needed now. When multiple cards are working and/or newer GPUs are available, this needs to be raised again.

max_ncpus back to "1".

avg_ncpus set to 0.25. If I keep the default value of 0.50, I have only three WU running at the same time : two optimized MW and one World Community Grid. With avg_ncpus to 0.25 I have four workunits (two for each project)

Travis > thank you very much for your answer about the credits, it's a very good news. For maximum number of units per core, I can say that : with a Core2Duo and a HD4850 512Mo, I crunched 2000 workunits in 6 hours (with no other projet running at the same time, so the CPU wasn't at full use). So 4.000 workunits per core and day will be enough for this configuration (my computer is working "only" 12 hours per day or so, so 4.000 WU per core and day is the very, very maximum). I don't know how many workunits can be crunched with another model of ATI.

Cluster > If I understand correctly, your optimization uses "only" one core at a time, is that right ? Is it possible to use more core, so we can use only Milkyway on one computer with more than one core ?

Do you need something special to help you for your tests ?

PS : during this writing I reached my 2.000 workunits limit - later than before, probably because I tried avg_ncpus to 0.10 ...

... I would agree that the compute errors are also download errors. But after reading both threads again, it seems to be restricted to quad cores & up. My 1Gig up to the core 2 duo all are working fine, just the i7 having issues.

Funny enough I had problems on all my 4 puters... *sigh*

These are:
- C2D lappy (Win XP 64-bit)
- Quad (Vista 32-bit)
- P4 (Win XP 32-bit)
- P4 lappy (Win XP 32-bit)

So it seems to affect not only faster/newer boxes. But it seems to affect only Windows machines, is that right?

I had two WUs on my lappy crunching with stock app v0.17 now.
Both seem to have finished without failure but one WU has vanished from my results' list as soon as it was reported so I can't say for sure. :-(
The other one has gone now, too and was here (at least I have seen that result marked as succesful before it was purged).

PS#1: This is no sign at all that the opti app isn't working correctly because:
a) not all WUs are erroring out while using opti app!
b) most of the errors are download errors which have nothing to do with any app!
Even the ones which are declared as "Compute error" are in fact download errors, see example:

<message>
WU download error: couldn't get input files:
<file_xfer_error>
<file_name>stars-82-v2.txt</file_name>
<error_code>-200</error_code>
</file_xfer_error>
</message>

The other errors I had yesterday (exceeded disk limit and some Windows Dumps) seem to have gone on all my system today. ;-)

PS#2: Concerning the download errors there must be something wrong on the server side, I guess... Because even the stock app doesn't know where to get the input files from, right? *grin*
I mean the server is giving out these input files and also the info where they are stored...

Looks like there are two error types, including those discussed in this thread

An example of the MD5 checksum error is here from BOINC messages tab -


12/02/2009 23:44:35|Milkyway@home|[error] MD5 check failed for /stars-79.txt
12/02/2009 23:44:35|Milkyway@home|[error] expected c0053b930967ae032adc2b8f23015a93, got 61a14313a3f0244e7f7be2df1645d5d8
12/02/2009 23:44:35|Milkyway@home|[error] Checksum or signature error for /stars-79.txt

This is much less, as an error, than the ones discussed in the other thrad.

What might have happened is that you didn't complete downloading one of the star files. You could try deleting it and making boinc re-download it. I think a project reset should do that.

I did a reset and have processed 100 wu's without errors now, and everything looks like it's downloading correctly.

thanks, Travis.

What might have happened is that you didn't complete downloading one of the star files. You could try deleting it and making boinc re-download it. I think a project reset should do that.

<core_client_version>5.10.28</core_client_version>
WU download error: couldn't get input files:
<file_xfer_error>
  <file_name>/stars-79.txt</file_name>
  <error_code>-119</error_code>
  <error_message>MD5 check failed</error_message>
</file_xfer_error>

Probably a WU configuration problem, the filename starts with a slash

All the sticky datafiles start with a slash recently, not had a prob with Linux or XP with that.

[edit] Hmm, mind you I'm using BOINC 6x [/edit]

Maybe it can power a larger version of the abacus Travis will be sending out? :-P

Do the work of 4 abacus', you know... a quad core. :P

lol, yeah, that's what reminded me of being hit by a pontiac sunbird last year.

Oh good lord. Years ago I drove a Pontiac Sunbird. I hated that crappy car.

I don't care for them myself, just muscle cars and classics.

lol, yeah, that's what reminded me of being hit by a pontiac sunbird last year.

Oh good lord. Years ago I drove a Pontiac Sunbird. I hated that crappy car.