boinc stuff

[vaughan]

...I think overall that the whole dc thing is rather in the doldrums as there just doesn't seem to be much enthusiasm for stuff like there used to be. Sorta goes hand in hand with the significant slowdown in forum posting across the teams spectrum. A lot of apathy out there in dc land I fear.

That is true. Recently I put some CPU Ghz on Poem@Home only to have the "inevitable" happen - the project ran out of work. It appeared to be quite reliable until I decided to crunch it In the official forum for the project when another user and myself posted that there was no work and the server gave http errors the admin eventually replied with words to the effect of "why is there a sudden increase in requests for work"? What two additional users broke his project! Sheesh.

I was stunned to say the least.

[Brucifer]

heh................ yup, that takes the cake Vaughan.

Makes you wonder what goes through the heads of these folks that put up a boinc project and then get ticked when they actually have to start holding up their end of the project... That part is the down side to boinc cause there are projects out there that shouldn't be there. Just a waste of everyones time.

[Nflight]

Brucifier, I also have run into the sse CPU driven work units on the Collatz Conjecture project, but with some manual labor I abort these work units and only run the GPU ones. Each time I download the 150 maximum workunits I always get a few CPU Wu's and abort them. Every BOINC project has some flaw to it, every Distributed Project must have flaws too, or we would not be human. Wait wait wait; is mitchell human or is he a god?

[vaughan]

OK whilst we are on the topic of BOINC I have one problem PC. This unit used to behave itself until BOINC Virtual Prairie cam out of hibernation last week. Its an Intel Q6600 running at stock 2.4GHz with Win XP 64 SP2 installed. On startup from booting it runs NPLB (4 instances) which is set for no additional work), Folding@Home on the nVidia 9800GT GPU and FAHSpy with RivaTuner set to make the GPU fan run at 100 percent, as well as Dimes and BOINC. Good old eOn starts but of course there is no work for it anymore so I close that application.

BOINC version is 6.10.18 and it persistently displays a message box:
Communicating with BOINC client. Please wait ...
Exit BOINC Manager or Cancel

How do I stop this annoying message from popping up and interrupting anything I try to do?

[Nflight]

BOINC version is 6.10.18 and it persistently displays a message box:
Communicating with BOINC client. Please wait ...
Exit BOINC Manager or Cancel

How do I stop this annoying message from popping up and interrupting anything I try to do?

Be patient is all I can say, It takes a few moments and then it will stop. Seems your pushing the page limit with the amount of workunits you have downloaded and have in your queue. When this happens that little popup occurs, Don't Exit BOINC Manager and Don't Cancel.!!! Just hang on while it gets through and it will go back to crunching. For the past 2 years I have endured this troublesome little popup. Only if you are pushing your system to the max does it occur. Having only 2 processors per computer, and only 2 gigs of RAM you can well bet I am struggling...

[Brucifer]

Unfortunately Vaughan I can't give you any answer to your question since I'm still trying to figure out the basic stuff here. :-)

And Nflight, there's lots of flaws..... LOL Like one that sorta stands out to me is that you can't assign processors/gpus to specific projects.... Say you are attached to a couple projects, and you want the gpu running collatz for instance, and and you want the cpu's crunching on the second project. Now I may be blind, but it appears that you can only have one computer system w/gpu crunching on one project at a time where the gpu is dedicated to something and the cpu's something else. I know you can direct time percentages to go to multiple projects and have the cpu/gpu cycle through those, but you can't dedicate the cpu/gpu independently to separate dedicated efforts. Now hopefully I'm wrong................................ ?????

[vaughan]

Brucifer you can assign your GPU to one project and the CPU to another by going to the project. Locate the project preferences page eg at Primegrid I wanted to run AP26 tasks on my GPU so I set my preference for HOME as CPU unchecked and GPU checked, further down I only checked the run AP26 project, save and exit.

Then, on your BOINC Manager enable PrimeGrid and it will run the AP26 tasks not other tasks. (I assume you have already downloaded and installed the CUDA driver.)

Now in BOINC Manager select another project, say Rosetta for example and enable it. BOINC will download tasks for that project.

If you want to be very fancy in Primegrid once you have configured the machine to get AP26 tasks for the GPU you can change the computer's location once again from the PG website under youraccount, your computers so that it is now WORK or SCHOOL instead of HOME. You could setup WORK to be one of the Sieving sub-projects and SCHOOL could be one of the LLR sub-projects. Check the use CPU box in the preferences. Now when you download new work on the machine it will grab the CPU tasks. This means you will have two (or more) sub-projects running on the computer - GPU and CPU tasks.

This is one of the reasons that Primegrid is so popular.

[Brucifer]

This is one of the reasons that Primegrid is so popular.

LOL, silly me, and here I was thinking it was popular because people were in love with the *science* of the project.

Yup, I got to thinking of what you were talking about after I made the earlier posting. It's been several years since I was on the beta testing for boinc so a lot has faded from the brain. I imagine that it will come back though.

At the moment I'm going through another upgrade cycle on another system to get the .NET Framework stuff installed so I can get another box on the Collatz stuff. I had left it crunching rc5. However as I can't get my regular rc5 account moved over to the team, I decided that I'd just crunch collatz until the rc5 folks get their database issues resolved. Unfortunately, if I am not *real* careful, the dark side just might grab me and I might just keep crunching some boinc stuff.

I don't have a bunch of systems online now days though. Twas getting a bit on the expensive side, so a while back I had just knocked it down to a few systems that had gpu's installed in them. And with boinc, I don't really care to use the cpu's any more than I have to as it is just another way to burn more electricity and generate more heat. The spouse-arino is getting ready to retire in the not too distant future so I'm slowing down on my computing billz. The gpu's are cool as it makes a major difference in one's ability to do some serious crunching without having to have a big herd of computers running all the time.