Posts by Richard Haselgrove

1) Message boards : Problems and Bug Reports : Problem - AVG Virus detects something (Message 124578)
Posted 3 days ago by Richard Haselgrove
Adding: Desc: C:Doc. & Setings\All users Application Data\BOINC\projects\
EINSTEIN.PHYS.UWM.edu\einstein_S6BuckettLVE_l.04_Windows_intelx86_SSE2.exe.

That's the name of the file they are questioning. I think they'll let it go if I get an okay from you guys. I'd hate to lose all my points.

OK, I think I know the file that AVG is questioning. Try

http://einstein2.aei.uni-hannover.de/download/einstein_S6BucketLVE_1.04_windows_intelx86__SSE2.exe

- slight difference from what you typed (one 't' in bucket, and a double underscore before SSE2), but it downloaded OK. I'll send it off to VirusTotal now.

Edit: this analysis from VirusTotal is good enough for me: I think it is safe for you to download the file, and tell AVG it's a false alarm.
2) Message boards : Problems and Bug Reports : Problem - AVG Virus detects something (Message 124570)
Posted 3 days ago by Richard Haselgrove
You can paste the download url (which you can find in your client_state.xml file) into https://www.virustotal.com/en/#url, and let Virus Total do the downloading and give you a comprehensive report at the end.
3) Message boards : News : Please register YOUR support for eLISA! (Message 124460)
Posted 14 days ago by Richard Haselgrove
Cool. My name is on the same page as Stephen Hawking. That'd be a first for him I expect. :-) :-0

Cheers, Mike.

So is mine :-)
4) Message boards : Cruncher's Corner : Any tasks CPU only? .. (Message 124459)
Posted 14 days ago by Richard Haselgrove
I would be willing to bet money that it will not go away unless the whole BOINC paradigm changes dramatically.

Hmmm.... remember how the Messages tab went away and in its place there was an Event Log? Remember how many people screamed (and threatened) about that, and did it ever change back? ;)

Very different, that didn't reduce functionality. I believe David added all the functionality of the app_config for a reason. One reason was to address the requests for a way to limit the number of concurrent tasks from demanding projects such as Lattice and Yoyo ECM (to name just a couple). Just saying, I don't think it's going away unless a better way is found to include the same or more functionality.

IIRC, the app_config.xml mechanism was designed and introduced at the specific request of World Community Grid - some of their sub-projects use so many resources that they swamp the host if multiple copies are allowed to run.

WCG is a big enough project that the functionality won't be allowed to disappear while they still need it, even if the method of delivery changes over time.
5) Message boards : News : Einstein@Home is the fourth project of the BOINC Pentathlon 2013 (Message 124411)
Posted 15 days ago by Richard Haselgrove
Is the date format Imperial or metric?

It's this month - May 08 to May 12, 2013.
6) Message boards : Cruncher's Corner : CCC 13,5_beta2 (Message 124237)
Posted 26 days ago by Richard Haselgrove
AMD's numbering scheme seems to be calendar based. 13.4 --> April 2013, so released. 13.5 --> May 2013, don't expect a full release this month (still April here). But the thread title does say beta - yes, they do start testing them before the start of the release month...
7) Message boards : Cruncher's Corner : Pendings rising?? (Message 124038)
Posted 41 days ago by Richard Haselgrove
I think you're correct in saying they reverse engineer the flops from the credit awarded and in the case of a few of the projects listed on everyone's chart the credit is way out of line IMO, most notably DT, although Donate & POEM are also very high compared to most. On the other hand there are projects with very low GPU credits such at Einstein, SETI and especially WCG (the 3 I'm currently running (along with GPUGrid):-).

You are correct about the credits at DT, thanks for giving me a shortcut!, I am using an AMD 7970 there and finish a unit in about 22 minutes, and am getting almost TWENTY THOUSAND credits for it!!! I can finish 3 units in about an hour so am earning around 50 to 60 thousand credits per hour!!! THAT IS HIGH by comparison to other projects. BUT credits are NOT supposed to be compared project to project, just within a specific project. Stats sites though DO track total credits earned though.

The problems only arise, to my mind at least, when you read data like this from BOINCstats:

DistrRTgen
Recent average credit RAC 616,020,961
Average floating point operations per second 3,080,104.8 GigaFLOPS / 3,080.105 TeraFLOPS

Einstein@Home
Recent average credit RAC 97,249,966
Average floating point operations per second 486,249.8 GigaFLOPS / 486.250 TeraFLOPS

Both projects exhibit exactly the same calculation of RAC 200 == 1 GigaFLOP (a relatively recent update from RAC 100 == 1 GigaFLOP, that I think we still use here).

If that got out into the public domain, it would appear that DistrRTgen was a six times larger project than this, at over 6 PetaFLOPS, and would take 5th position in the Top500 list. With fewer than 2,500 active users, that would be quite some achievement.
8) Message boards : Problems and Bug Reports : Disk space question (h1_0xxx.xx_S6GC1 files) (Message 124033)
Posted 41 days ago by Richard Haselgrove
As with anything (especially where Windows is concerned), there are many ways of achieving the same thing.

Not knowing the general level of technical knowledge in the audience here (and being aware that there are generally many more readers than posters), I chose a relatively robust, 'by the book' process.

In reality, all I was telling you to do was to change the string stored in

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Space Sciences Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley\BOINC Setup]
"DATADIR"="D:\\BOINCdata\\"

- you'll see that I've already moved mine away from the default location.

If you move the program location too, the value to change is

"INSTALLDIR"="D:\\BOINC\\"

For anybody comfortable in a command line scripting environment, it would be simple to wrap a STOP|MOVE|REG|START script round that, and automate the whole process. But it's not advisable for the GUI generation.
9) Message boards : Problems and Bug Reports : Disk space question (h1_0xxx.xx_S6GC1 files) (Message 124025)
Posted 41 days ago by Richard Haselgrove
That's worth knowing, thanks. Certainly under linux it's that simple.

How do you move the BOINC location under windows, edit the registry setting or is doing this just not feasible?

The easiest way is:

* Shut down BOINC
* Uninstall the BOINC program (which leaves data untouched)
* Move the data folder to the new location
* Re-run the BOINC Windows installer, using the 'Advanced' screen option to set the new location where the data already is.

It takes longer to describe than to do!
10) Message boards : Cruncher's Corner : Pendings rising?? (Message 124024)
Posted 41 days ago by Richard Haselgrove
Mike, I understand. The word 'efficiency' appears to have kicked up a certain amount of dust here. I can accept that. What is 'efficient' for me with a collection of mid range ATI GPU's might be significantly different than for others.

I got the impression (might be wrong, and glad if I am) that Richard might have been taking umbrage at my use of that word. Then I responded in a way that might be interpreted as 'umbrage at the umbrage'. In any event, I'm quite happy providing CPU support for this project (and have been for nearly 8 years).

Sorry, and apologies if it came over as umbrage.

I found myself going down the NVidia route when GPGPU computing first got under way, and I don't have direct personal experience of ATI hardware. But I do remember being surprised by some of the accelerations being reported for BOINC project applications being ported from CPU to ATI - I was working with third-party NVidia developers at the time, and seeing how hard they were having to work to achieve seemingly smaller accelerations.

So, I'm genuinely interested in understanding why ATI projects seem to score so highly in processing terms. Is their silicon better designed and fabricated? Have the ATI projects attracted particularly skilled programmers? In some cases (Moo and Collatz come to mind), are they solving mathematically simpler - primarily integer - problems? (but then, MilkyWay's requirement for double-precision maths points in the opposite direction). And so on...

One particular issue for me is BOINC's habit of reverse-engineering speed and computation benchmarks from cobblestones awarded. We almost came close to that in the petaflop thread here (news section). I'm always made a bit nervous by the GFLOPS numbers on BOINC's Top 100 participants page - how do those projects (seemingly) squeeze so many more flops out of the same silicon that everybody else is using? And can we have some of their magic, please!


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This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grants PHY-1104902, PHY-1104617 and PHY-1105572 and by the Max Planck Gesellschaft (MPG). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the investigators and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF or the MPG.

Copyright © 2013 Bruce Allen