10 April 2013

10th of April

I haven't updated my stats in a while. At the moment most of the farm is concentrating on Asteroids@home. I am currently on 600,000 credits and I am trying to get to 1 million credits.


BOINC testing
We got 7.0.60 late last week. The main change in this is to correct an XML parsing bug that appeared with CPDN. They run a really old version of BOINC on their servers.

I expect there will some other minor changes before its ready for release. There was one particular crashing bug one of the guys found. I also raised a query as to why the Raspberry Pi doesn't report its CPU information.

The resource share bug still seems to be in this, however the client seems to alternate between projects so it may be doing the right thing over the longer term. In the 6.x versions it would run the appropriate resource shares of projects all at the same time. The 7.x version is designed to be less monotonous.


Project news - Einstein
I asked last week what is going to happen with the BRP4 single DM app that I am testing with the Raspberry Pi's. It looks like their current plan is:
  1. Introduce a BRP5 search using data from the Parkes Perseus Arm survey
  2. The current BRP4 search will become CPU only
  3. Allow the BRP4 search to do single DM work units


Project news - Seti
Their server relocation went surprisingly well. Apart from having staff available 24 hours a day to kick machines when needed they have better cooling and power. In addition they seem to have much better network bandwidth.

Looking at the new Cricket graphs it seems its running at 350Mbit instead of the capped 100Mb they had before. This means transfers are now much quicker and no more getting backed off. With this improvement I will now resume Seti crunching, especially once Asteroids gets to 1 million.


3 comments:

Chris said...

What's your interest in SETI? It always seemed to me the project least likely to produce results.

Mark G James said...

In answer to Chris's question, I run Seti for a few reasons. One is they have the latest version of BOINC changes. Another is their optimised apps tend to also be latest in trying out new stuff. Lastly it was the first project I started with (before BOINC came along) it holds a sentimental value.

However I think the science part is questionable and too limited in scope for their searches. I don't expect it to find ET.

Chris said...

Interesting! I remember doing a mini-internship in the German Aerospace Center as a kid and that was the first time I heard about SETI. The work PCs there had 4 GB RAM and that blew my mind (in 1997!), as did the colour laser printer :)