Is the error rate tracked per user or per computer? Is it possible to have this metric added in the appropriate section so that it is visible to us? With the quick purge rate specific task errors can quickly disappear from our sight. (Probably a change request for the BOINC dev team, but worthwhile since this figure is an important part in our contributions and how we manage our systems.)

Um, it should really be per computer per GPU class ... sad to say some of us have mixed ATI / Nvidia systems working and may see different error rates on the different GPU classes (see 58xx issues of awhile-ago) ...

Of course we have been asking for DCF to be on an application level for like forever and it is still not there yet ...

We're having some database issues which is why the server isn't sending out any work. I've contacted labstaff and elevated the ticket to emergency so hopefully we'll have things fixed shortly. I think we might have to move to yesterday's backup.

I've got an Intel i7 based machine that has been getting only 4 CPU work units to crunch at a time (doing it on the CPU only). My safety stock is empty. Obviously the machine would like 8 or more units. I was running 6.10.18 but upgraded today to 6.10.43 as it is now the recommended version and I was hoping that it would solve the problem. Nope! I also detached/ reattached but that also didn't help. Yesterday I reset my preferences to 5 days of cache and updated the preferences. No help there either. My lap top has since received a nice cache but my main cruncher is at a loss for enough work. Any ideas?

If things are not better soon, could you consider figuring out a way to utilize "Homogeneous Redundancy"-like capability to group GPUs away from CPUs? I know I'm not adding much in comparison to people with GPUs anymore, but now that you're grouping me with GPUs that are having problems validating, I'm burning electricity for nothing sometimes.

That won't fix the problem (at least on our end). We want the results to be accurate. If we're getting certain results from certain OS/architectures and certain results from others how do we know which ones are the right ones?

I'm really hoping we have this sorted out in the next couple days. I know having invalid results is really frustrating.

The database is having a bit of trouble keeping up with all the new results due to a quorum of 3, so for the time being I'm dropping it to a quorum of 2.
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On another note, we should have source code for the new application available tomorrow.

It's good to hear you're on top of things - I hope BOINC gives you enough capabilities to deal with the scammers. Will these changes affect the distribution of the anonymous platform apps? For instance, will new versions need to be validated before being allowed, assuming you have the capability to enforce validation?

Once the new validator gets up and going validation will work as follows:

Any result that could potentially improve one of our searches will be validated (with a quorum of 2 or 3).

Previously, any result that wouldn't improve our searches we ignored. I'll be validating 50 - 100% of these for the next couple weeks so everyones error rate gets update correctly.

After everyone's error rate has leveled out, I'll drop the validation done on these workunits to whatever % the error rate of host returning the result is (minimum 10%).

So we'll still be validating every potentially good result, but we'll be using BOINC's adaptive validation for everything else.

Btw., I will try to compile CPU versions with a fixed progress bar during the weekend.

Any progress on this?

Thanks...

Sorry, was busy with other stuff. What about next weekend?

The fix is really simple, I just need a free one hour time slot to compile the stuff for the five targets currently supported, do a short test on each, and to adapt the app_info.xml files.

"Next weekend" as in 2 days from now, or as in 9 days from now?

Without the progress percentage, those of us with CPU apps are somewhat "flying blind", hoping that we do not have a bad task. So far everything has been ok, but will it continue that way?

The ps_13_3s count fine for me.

Btw., I will try to compile CPU versions with a fixed progress bar during the weekend.

Any progress on this?

Thanks...

Sorry, was busy with other stuff. What about next weekend?

The fix is really simple, I just need a free one hour time slot to compile the stuff for the five targets currently supported, do a short test on each, and to adapt the app_info.xml files.

Btw., I will try to compile CPU versions with a fixed progress bar during the weekend.

In my opinion, you should consider looking at whether or not there is a way to use Homogeneous Redundancy classes to separate GPU from CPU and give GPUs the longer task and leave the shorter tasks to CPUs.

HR isn't a factor here. With a quorum of 1, you don't use multiple replications for validation.

Thanks for implementing native ATI support!

And now that we have it, how about issuing tasks exclusively for ATI GPUs that run (say) for an hour (on a 4870)?

No change in credits/hour. That way we can fill up a normal queue of work lasting (say) a day or two.

In addition to letting us to weather downtime or network issues, it would DRAMATICALLY drop the load on the project server and network load.

I think that might really take some new science from the astronomers. We do have a change in the works that should increase the compute time by (hopefully) another factor of 2 - 4. Once we get the server side GPU issues settled, we'll be releasing that.

Except that we should all my now be using the wonderful new automagically-downloaded-from-the-server apps. :)

I can confirm that Catalyst 9.12 works, I was able to complete several work units in a row, thanks to The Gas Giant for bringing this to my attention. Currently only the Windows 64 bit version will be available and I think it relies on Catalyst 9.7+ for Windows 7/Vista, and 9.12 for Windows XP users. If all goes well the Windows 32 bit version will also be deployed on BOINC.

I'd be happy with an hour of work cached for MW so that when a project maintenance back off occurs I can keep crunching or loose very little time. But my hour is different to your hour or his hour as we have different set ups. For example I have a 4850 and a 4870 in my Q9450 box. The longer wu's take approx 3.5 min and 3 min respectively. So that would mean I'd need to have cached 38 wu's, currently I get 24 which is about 39 minutes. With a few shorties of 55 seconds, that drops down to less than 30 minutes.

In my old P4/HT with the 3850 in it, the long wu's take 10 minutes so I get closer to 2 hrs of cache or less with a few shorties.

Imagine a box with 3 or 4 5870's in it....holy cow!

Why not limit the short WUs to CPU clients? That will at least help a little. Allowing GPU clients to cache more WUs would also solve the problem.

I would think / hope that the server would be able to differentiate between a GPU and a CPU, so once all is in place, in theory the 3-stream tasks could go to those of you with GPUs and perhaps increase your caches as well, up to perhaps double what they are now. After that, the 1-stream and 2-stream tasks can go to CPU participants, again with double the cache (from 6 to 12).

That would certainly help the situation and I agree with the exception that the cache size should be more than doubled for GPUs. On the fastest GPUs the long WUs take 80 seconds, so even with only one of those GPUs on a dual core processor the cache amounts to 16 minutes. That's just not enough to allow BOINC to do any kind of management. The end result is that many get frustrated and dump the project altogether. It's only 1 in a 100 dissatisfied users that post here or even understand why it's not working correctly. We need to get the queue size up to a minimum of several hours in order for BOINC manager to schedule properly.

Why not limit the short WUs to CPU clients? That will at least help a little. Allowing GPU clients to cache more WUs would also solve the problem.

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.

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.