Upgrade to Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

I just couldn't resist and decided to upgrade a perfect/tuned/optimized machine to the new version of Ubuntu via the Synaptic distribution upgrade. All went well for half an hour or so and then the upgrade crashed. A whole barrage of bug reporting options appeared and it eventually landed up sitting there with the normal desktop showing. I knew the kernel had upgraded etc, so I rebooted.
The results were better than I expected, it booted and even BOINC was alive and still running the 190 series driver from the old installation. However I keep getting warnings about my BIOS and ECC memory problems and needing to reboot. Looking at the forums, I am not the only one affected by this. I will give it a few days and see if there are any patches released ... if not, I will take the plunge and do a clean install.
The only BOINC causality appears to be QMC@Home. The Orca work-units appear to run OK (and as slowly as usual) but the normal workunits crash due to libstdc++.so.5 missing from Karmic. I will try and drag them out from an older distro when I have some time.
My initial feeling is that the upgrade from 9.04 (Jaunty) wasn't really worth the effort but will see if that feeling changes when a few more bugs are ironed out.

Intel's Progress Through Processors in Facebook

I have seen a little ad on my Facebook page for a while for Intel's "Progress Through Processors" application in some sort of partnership with GridRepublic and decided to have a look at it due to my interest in volunteer computing. Well ... err, it's Boinc by a different name! I'm not sure what Intel is trying to do with this. I'm pretty sure Berkeley was the driving force behind this and not Intel?! This application has even created a different credit system of "G-hours" instead of "Cobblestones"

I currently have completed 734,242 G-hours for what it is worth...

They also seem to think I have an account with NanoHive, a project I have never signed up for.

I guess the up-side is that the projects will get a lot more "non-technical" crunchers signing up now that it is on Facebook but I give a "thumbs down" to Intel for trying to make it their own idea. Give credit where it is due!

R.I.P. Unwired in Sydney

When I moved into my current apartment around a year ago, I didn't want to commit to a 12/24 month ADSL contract and at that time the Aussie pre-paid 3G offerings were not worth considering. I opted for Unwired and after a couple of days of moving their "wabbit" modem around, I eventually got an "Ok" service by taping it to the inside of my lounge window and using a Wi-fi router. The metal tray in the picture is there to try and stop it hunting between the two antennas in the modem as that disrupts any data through-put.

This arrangement has done the job and has even allowed the occasional VOIP call when the humidity/tides/moon phase etc have been just right for an optimum connection.

In the last week however, the service has diminished to a point where it isn't usable anymore. The modem shows "connecting..." for anything between 5 minutes and 5 hours before allowing a couple of minutes of traffic.

I'm not sure what the problem is but am moderately sure nothing has changed on my side. For the few brief minutes per day when I get service, the signal strength is what it normally was.

So, anyone on the northern beaches who is considering Unwired ... DON'T! I will go shopping on the weekend and see what I can find in the way of 3G modems and reasonably priced plans.

3 Million :-)

Well at long last, the 3 million mark has been reached! Its a bit depressing when you see some users doing that in "a day or two" but this is my contribution since I joined SETI in 1999.

Collatz for 64-bit Linux CUDA

On the Collatz website, there is a section called "optimized applications" with a 64-bit Linux CUDA client. I used the exact same procedure to install it as is listed for the VLAR-kill SETI application a bit earlier in this blog. I'm knocking out a work-unit in about 33 minutes on the 9800GT card ... and each one is worth around 570 cobblestones, so not a bad return.
I'm still not sure what was causing the GPUGrid units to fail on this card but I am hoping to keep it running on a mixture of Collatz and SETI. At some stage I may look at building an app_info.xml that allows me to run both CPU & GPU work units for Milkyway on this machine. The only problem at the moment is that they will only give me 12 work-units which the CPU can kill off on its own in a day. I have already got the 8600GT/Celeron running a both SSE3 and a CUDA app for Milkyway and I am always out of work units.

Linux nVidia driver update

I do get a lot more credit per hour on GPUGrid than I do on SETI, so I looked for another project for the 9800GT card now that I have problems with GPUGrid. I attached to Collatz but that is running a beta application for Linux Cuda and despite spending an hour messing with the set-up and moving files around, I couldn't get it to work. It trashes work units immediately each time. The Windoze version seems to run fine on the 'ol 8600GT.
One of the comments on the Collatz message board says you need driver version 190.xx ...so, I upgraded to 190.32. It was a painless upgrade and everything else seems to work fine except Collatz. I have allowed new work units from GPUGrid and will watch to see if they complete without errors. If not ... then I am back to the joys of trying to keep a 9800GT card running!

Travelling the same road again...

Well, the Leadtek 9800GT ran well for the first 3 weeks and now, as with the Galaxy card, there are more and more work units crashing. The last three GPUGrid work units have returned a "process exited with code 1 (0x1, -255)". The Boinc wiki says that this could be caused by out-of-date drivers but I don't buy that as things were working really well last week.
Anyway, will move the card over to SETI Cuda work units and see if they also report errors.