SLinCA@Home (new boinc project)

[NeoGen]

SLinCA (Scaling Laws in Cluster Aggregation) is a research project that uses Internet-connected computers to do research in field of materails science. You can participate by downloading and running a free program on your computer.

Never heard of this around the forums, but I see a good bunch of people already in it and our Team created... come on guys, don't keep it a secret! :icon_wink:

Account creation is open, but that's about it... no work for us... looking at the news on the mainpage their server seems to have more problems than windows has bugs. :icon_lol:

[liuqyn]

You forgot to include a link, so here it is SLinCA@Home (http://dg.imp.kiev.ua/slinca/), sorry about not posting this myself, didn't even think about it.

[vaughan]

As usual ... unable to get the password email sent to my email address. Stupid BOINC!!!!

Help please can someone with access post the usual message on the forum boards please?

Also how do you read the Russian script? When I click on the thead entitles How to change the forum language to English it still displays in Russian for me.

[liuqyn]

their forums are a separate log on, use this Link (http://distributed.org.ua/forum/index.php?showtopic=4942) for instructions in English (with pictures) one how to create forum account and then you can post about getting access.

[vaughan]

Gee that's hard work. I registered (eventuall) but don't know how to post my message.

As I said before BOINC wide teams is a right royal pain.

[AMDave]

The SlinCA server appears to have run out of disk space for the moment.

Vaughan, could you PM me your BoincWideTeam logon please.
I would like to look at the config and find out what may be causing the issue.
I intend to run a test on your account using my email address and then switch it back to yours.
Or you can run that test yourself and I will forward you any email that I receive.

[liuqyn]

boinc wide teams doesn't setup the passwords for the new projects, only the user account and team creation. it is then up to the project to setup their email system so the team leader can request an account access key for initial logon. it seams most new projects as of late fail to do this and all the team leaders are locked out until the admins get around to fixing the problem.

[AMDave]

That's what I thought too.
But then I observed in the early stats that some team founders are able to access ok.
In that case, I hypothesized that it would not be a systemic problem but some difference in configuration.
That said, I suspect that if the BOINC server email defaults to port-25 could also produce a similar behaviour where some outgoing emails are blocked and some are not.
Those are the two theories that I have.
The best I can do is have a look at it and do some tests to try to eliminate the alternatives

[Nflight]

Looks like being leader is not what I thought it would be, Sorry Vaughan!

[AMDave]

Taking point has some obvious hazards.
On the flip side it can often be exhilarating.
It depends on the realization that is arrived at at the time.
Sometimes good.
Sometimes bad.
But always right on the edge and the first to know.

[vaughan]

Still unable to join this project.

Plenty of others to crunch tho'

[AMDave]

No problem getting onto the project now.
Lots of work right now.
It's not a bandwidth hog, but I did find my desktops getting a little bit sluggish.
This client is getting all of the 100% out of all cpus.

Have a look at the applications page.
All client apps refreshed last week.

They have different clients for different hardware specs for both linux and windows.
Someone put their thinking cap on and worked out how to get the max out of the volunteer boxen.
Nice work.

[AMDave]

Significant rate of computation errors though.
Winding it down again.

[AMDave]

Further examination reveals that all windows platforms error-ed 32 and 64 bit, winXP and Win7, AMD and Intel.
All linux platforms completed work successfully without errors.
There seems to be a fundamental problem with the windows apps.

[Dirk Broer]

:icon_twisted:You can add Windows8 64 bit to the list of platforms that only give errors.
I removed the project from the Windows8 box and wait for the Windows7 box to return something valid.
If not then I remove the project there as well. Viewed by the number of participants in the challenge so far,
only team Colombia itself (with them un-Colombian names) can get valid results:help:

[Dirk Broer]

I've aborted my attempt to get points with this project. If you manage to get a WU till the end you cannot upload it, and the results gets shown as "Error while computing". They can ##$% my &^%$ if they want, but I get out.

[Nflight]

Sometimes we can not do every project with ease. It may take awhile till they find they could be doing more beneficial work if they would just fix their current system.

[Dirk Broer]

Challenge is going on now for more than two days. Still only two participants, both from Team Colombia.
I tried to upload some 6 results (http://dg.imp.kiev.ua/slinca/results.php?userid=2798&offset=0&show_names=0&state=5), but they were all given as errors on the project site, while the client just could not get through the server whilst trying to upload. Seems outsiders are just not able to connect, at least not at the moment.
Let the sort out their side of the system first before commiting themselves to a challenge, or at least try to improve as SAT@Home did.

[Dirk Broer]

One year later, still the same:

14-03-2013 01:16:58 | SLinCA@Home | Computation for task fd487785-0bb7-499a-b394-9ac680e2f58b_fe9fe4cd-0ebc-4659-b0b2-e3422bc9635c_333_0 finished
14-03-2013 01:16:58 | SLinCA@Home | Starting task fd487785-0bb7-499a-b394-9ac680e2f58b_f00e0f13-936a-40ce-8bc2-c6b189117a3d_811_0 using heavy_lodci011eq32v0p125T1XZ32 version 3232 in slot 2
14-03-2013 01:17:02 | SLinCA@Home | Started upload of fd487785-0bb7-499a-b394-9ac680e2f58b_fe9fe4cd-0ebc-4659-b0b2-e3422bc9635c_333_0_0
14-03-2013 01:17:02 | SLinCA@Home | Started upload of fd487785-0bb7-499a-b394-9ac680e2f58b_fe9fe4cd-0ebc-4659-b0b2-e3422bc9635c_333_0_1
14-03-2013 01:17:05 | SLinCA@Home | [error] Error reported by file upload server: invalid signature
14-03-2013 01:17:05 | SLinCA@Home | [error] Error reported by file upload server: invalid signature
14-03-2013 01:17:05 | SLinCA@Home | Giving up on upload of fd487785-0bb7-499a-b394-9ac680e2f58b_fe9fe4cd-0ebc-4659-b0b2-e3422bc9635c_333_0_0: permanent upload error
14-03-2013 01:17:05 | SLinCA@Home | Giving up on upload of fd487785-0bb7-499a-b394-9ac680e2f58b_fe9fe4cd-0ebc-4659-b0b2-e3422bc9635c_333_0_1: permanent upload error
14-03-2013 01:17:05 | SLinCA@Home | Started upload of fd487785-0bb7-499a-b394-9ac680e2f58b_fe9fe4cd-0ebc-4659-b0b2-e3422bc9635c_333_0_2
14-03-2013 01:17:05 | SLinCA@Home | Started upload of fd487785-0bb7-499a-b394-9ac680e2f58b_fe9fe4cd-0ebc-4659-b0b2-e3422bc9635c_333_0_3
14-03-2013 01:17:07 | SLinCA@Home | [error] Error reported by file upload server: invalid signature
14-03-2013 01:17:07 | SLinCA@Home | [error] Error reported by file upload server: invalid signature
14-03-2013 01:17:07 | SLinCA@Home | Giving up on upload of fd487785-0bb7-499a-b394-9ac680e2f58b_fe9fe4cd-0ebc-4659-b0b2-e3422bc9635c_333_0_2: permanent upload error
14-03-2013 01:17:07 | SLinCA@Home | Giving up on upload of fd487785-0bb7-499a-b394-9ac680e2f58b_fe9fe4cd-0ebc-4659-b0b2-e3422bc9635c_333_0_3: permanent upload error
14-03-2013 01:22:09 | SLinCA@Home | Sending scheduler request: To report completed tasks.
14-03-2013 01:22:09 | SLinCA@Home | Reporting 1 completed tasks, not requesting new tasks
14-03-2013 01:22:11 | SLinCA@Home | Scheduler request completed

My Ukrainian isn't good enough to post on their forum, maybe I'll try Google translate to find out how to log in their forum (when I am already logged into my account I seem to have to login even further)

[vaughan]

I tried running a bunch of Slinca tasks; they took ages to run and ended in computation errors. I scored zero points for over a week's CPU time.

Useless waste of time project and their forum is incomprehensible gibberish.

[AMDave]

I remember having almost 100% fail on windows
much better rate of success on linux
most of the top computers are linux: http://dg.imp.kiev.ua/slinca/top_hosts.php

[Dirk Broer]

The culprits seem to be the out_data.zip files, which are not valid.
As they were only 1k big, I changed the property of one to *.txt and opened it with notepad.
It contained just this: <soft_link>../../projects/dg.imp.kiev.ua_slinca/fd487785-0bb7-499a-b394-9ac680e2f58b_23b138a0-56bb-48ba-87e1-4f89c8e47fc1_821_0_3</soft_link>
In my eyes no justification for the use of a *zip file. I let it be out_data.txt and see what happens. In the worst case I get a compute error.:dontknow:
On second thoughts I created a new out_data.zip file containing the out_dat.txt file. I have high hopes for this approach:icon_cool:
It it works, I will translate this posting into Ukrainian -using Google translate- and post it at the SLinCA forum so they can have a laugh as well (about the quality of the translation).
We will know more in about 28 hours....

[Dirk Broer]

Gone are my high hopes. The out_data.zip file gets recreated during the running or closing of the WU, so after 28 hours of running it is still for nought on the Windows platform.

I've aborted my attempt to get points with this project. If you manage to get a WU till the end you cannot upload it, and the results gets shown as "Error while computing". They can ##$% my &^%$ if they want, but I get out.
But there is progress: you can actually upload your waste to the project....

[Dirk Broer]

On the bright side of this project: It runs good -a bit long per WU though- on Linux.
Someone in the Ukraine switched off the feeder Saturday, and now I have a queue
of ready WU's waiting for them -and a new top-100 score-....