End of 2011

The "farm" has been shut down for the Christmas break (as of 23 Dec), so the accumulation of credit has ground to a halt. I am still concentrating almost exclusively on SETI@Home with Collatz running on my one ATI card as I cant find a Linux/ATI app for SETI.
I have been running TilesAtHome for the OpenStreetMap project again and am just short of having rendered 2 million map tiles. I may reach that milestone by midnight if there are no unexpected glitches. There have been occasions where the tilesGen app uses massive amounts of memory which causes a massive swap file to be created and this hammers the RAID array until something breaks. I have seen a complete reboot as a result of this happening.
I have restricted the "complexity" that my system will accept but this does not seem to entire resolve the problem...

SETI over 1million

Well, its taken since 1999 to get to the 1 million mark!
Based on the fact that my average daily credit average has fallen from over 50k with a mix of projects to under 10k with everything on SETI@home ... I can kinda see why it took so long to get there!

Change of focus!

My aging collection of PC hardware is steadily falling back through the ranks these days and I find it a bit depressing to watch world ranking/country rank & team rank all erode. I have decided to go back to the project that started it all for me ... seti@home. I was surprised to see that I haven't even hit the 1 million mark in this project despite the years involved. From now on, most my resources will be concentrating on seti@home. I will obviously still remain attached to the other projects to ensure that I still get work while seti@home is down and due to the fact that I have some hardware that I can't get seti@home to run on (e.g. an ATI card under Linux).

My first step was to get my desktop (AMD X2 & nVidia GT9800) to run both CPU and GPU work units. It took a while and a few restarts but I got the app_info.xml file working eventually.

Power supply puzzle

I had two power supplies die within 6 hours of each other last week. The strange thing is that the machines had nothing in common (except OS). They were different ages, different MB manufacturers, different PSU makes and about 6km away from each other.
Thankfully, only two decided to give up the ghost ... so everything is now fixed and running again.
The 26 million cobblestone mark went trundling by sometime yesterday. My 'ol Nvidia 9800GT is still delivering some useful credit on PrimeGrid :-)

25 Million!

Ok, even I admit that this type of post is getting rather monotonous but I have had other things on my plate and BOINC is just trundling along in the background. For instance the IBM x-series is still crunching ... I know this because every week or so I watch it for a couple of seconds to see if the drive LED flashes.
Looking at BOINCstats, I will reach 32.5 million by the end of the year if nothing changes.

And now 23 million!

I've been busy with Linux based ARM9 devices recently... and despite the temptation to install BOINC on them, I know the credits really wont justify the effort.
Not much new in my part of the world besides several projects being down this week ... DNETC, Aqua etc

Woohoo! 20 million...

I just noticed that my credit passed 20 million this morning! Not bad considering the hardware involved.

Sudoku@vtaiwan on Linux

I attached to suduko@vtaiwan with two Windows machines (no problems) and a 32-bit Linux machine. I kept getting "process exited with code 195 (0xc3, -61)". I chmod'ed the project directory to "777" and all seems to work fine now under Ubuntu 8.04 server.

I've given up on Unity!

I gave it a try, honestly I did. But I have had enough of trying to find apps that I am sure are installed but I just can't find. I have to give a thumbs down to Ubuntu 11.04.
Before returning to the excellent 10.04LTS, I did try and install Gnome 3 on top of 11.04. That was a complete disaster. It didn't work well, hung every couple of seconds and somehow managed to reset my BIOS settings.

While on the topic of sad developments ... MS has bought Skype :-( That is probably the end of Skype for Linux, Skype for Android, Skype for Mac etc etc

ATI card on Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal"

Well, I upgraded my home computer to the latest 64-bit Ubuntu version. I can start by saying that I am not enjoying 'Unity" as yet. This could be because I have used Gnome for so long, but I will give it a couple of days and see if it grows on me.
The second problem is using an ATI GPU with Boinc. It just doesn't work "out of the box" with the default Catalyst and BOINC installs. I have added the "boinc" user to the video group etc but at this stage it just doesn't recognize the GPU.

Edit: I forgot about this little piece of advice that I mentioned in a previous post:

In /etc/default/boinc-client set the user to "root"
# The BOINC core client will be started with the permissions of this user.
BOINC_USER="root"

I'm now just battling to find work for the GPU as DNETC is offline, this card doesn't meet the requirements for Milkyway, I still can't get PrimeGrid to run due to an unresolved issue with the AMD SDK/OpenCL ... and I don't like Collatz as it renders the PC very slow and unresponsive.

Update...

Well, still ticking along and managing to make some gains in the rankings. I am back in the Australian top 100 (well, position 100 to be exact), but thats not bad considering the most powerful piece of hardware I have is a 9800GT card.
I did pass 15 million credits a couple of hours ago too.

Boincstats seem to have changed their user-ids, so I need to update everything to show my stats again. Not sure what happened there!

Bench-marking cancelled

It was my intention to run 10 of my favorite projects on an equal resource share and determine which gave the best credit for my specific mix of OS, CPU,nVidia &ATI cards . My original intention was to run like this for a full week. I set-up last week and was waiting for the work-unit requests to level out. However it has become apparent where my credit come from already ... so I am back trying to climb the ladder this week.

You're the Collatz Conjecture user of the day!

"Congratulations!

You've been chosen as the Collatz Conjecture user of the day! Your profile will be featured on the Collatz Conjecture website for the next 24 hours."
- Thanks, Collatz!

Choosing projects

I am attached to 10 BOINC projects and often ponder what resource share to allocate to each one to get a good daily credit as well as contribute some meaningful data to science.
While there are some tables around that list the credit/hour ratings of the various projects, that real-world results are probably fairly different due to a mix of operating systems, GPU vs CPU etc.

To get some indication of how to run my "farm" for 2011, I have decided to run all the projects with an equal resource share for a week. I have allowed each project to run its own applications (no optimized apps) and its choice of sub-project.

The projects involved are:

AQUA@Home
QMC@Home
PrimeGrid
LHC@Home
DNETC@Home
Collatz Conjecture
Milkyway@Home
Rosetta@Home
Einstein@Home
SETI@Home

The only project with modified preferences is Collatz Conjetcure. Its CPU application would take around 1200 hours on my slower CPU's, thus rendering a 1 week trial pointless. Collatz's ATI/Linux app also slows my PC down to a point where it is unusable, so that is excluded too.
As AQUA@Home is currently down and tomorrow is a public holiday in Australia, I have decided to start the evaluation on 31/01/2011. This will also allow the PCs time to run out excessive work units from certain projects that had high resource share.

Collatz on x64-Ubuntu with ATI card

My home PC is almost unusable, it is so slow if I let the ATI card process data-units while I am trying to use it. I discovered by chance, that the problem only occurs with Collatz work units. DNetC does not suffer from the same problem. I have now set Collatz to "No New Work" on this machine.

Back at work :-(

Well, Jan 10 and everything is back up and running. I have slipped over 100 places internationally and 5 places in my team during my end-of-year shutdown. It's going to be a long slow process to climb back up the ladder as my hardware is now all pretty old and slow compared to the latest CPUs & GPUs... so I may concentrate on the science side instead of chasing credits for 2011!