Posts by Mad Matt

Mad Matt

If you look at the top computers you may notice that almost all of them regularly post invalid tasks. This is VERY unusual compared to other projects and may indicate either a problem with 0.82 or a validator problem. The former CP apps did not exhibit this behavior.

Mad Matt

@Assimilator1:

it should get better if you:
- report all finished MW tasks (assuming you're running 0.62 already)
- stop your BOINC
- place a file called "app_info.xml" in your MW folder with the following content:

<app_info>
<app>
<name>milkyway</name>
</app>
<file_info>
<name>milkyway_0.62_windows_intelx86__ati14.exe</name>
<executable/>
</file_info>
<app_version>
<app_name>milkyway</app_name>
<version_num>62</version_num>
<plan_class>ati14</plan_class>
<flops>1.0e11</flops>
<avg_ncpus>0.05</avg_ncpus>
<max_ncpus>1</max_ncpus>
<coproc>
<type>ATI</type>
<count>0.5</count>
</coproc>
<cmdline>--gpu-target-frequency 60</cmdline>
<file_ref>
<file_name>milkyway_0.62_windows_intelx86__ati14.exe</file_name>
<main_program/>
</file_ref>
</app_version>
</app_info>

This will increase the target screen refresh time from 30 Hz to 60 Hz, which in my case is enough to make it almost smooth again. You can also adjust "<count>0.5</count>" to "<count>1</count>" if you want to run 1 WU at a time rather than 2 WUs at a time (as I'm currently doing to avoid the idle GPU time between WUs).
I don't expect you'd need to adjust polling with this.

MrS

Mad Matt

I experienced that when crunching 2 WU's with 0.62 on two ATI 5870, looking to NASA-TV is no joy as the stream freezes a lot. Sound stay uninterrupted.
Not a big deal as I have more rigs to watch NASA. But with 0.23 I hadn't this experience.

Mad Matt

This is embarassing. I think the project would be better off if they just restored last week's version and our administrators backed off, took a few deep breaths and did some real software engineering and project planning.

If this were a release from a for-profit software company I would agree with you. Considering this is a volunteer science project run on a very tight budget I have to disagree.

There was an initial unplanned oops which took the project down and was going to necessitate a few days to recover. What better time to throw in the upcoming changes that might mess things up and take the project down for a few days? It also saves a lot of time and money avoiding all that pesky beta testing, scheduled roll outs and downtime. People tend to be more productive when they're under the gun. ;-)