I'm writing this as a contribution for the minority of us running Macs - and to encourage people to go beyond the safest way for the much faster and seemingly pretty safe way. What I've done is read lots of bits and pieces and tried to make it work for me. Then I've turned that knowledge into this guide.... This is not for those of you who want to install it and have it "just work". This is for those of you who want to be a geek!

MIGRATING

For those seeking to use their OSX Macintosh computers for Seti@Home still/again, you may well be aware that they've been migrating to running in BOINC form for some time and now the news is that the transition between BOINC and Classic Seti@Home is almost
finished. Dec 15th is the cut off date but they've reached a new level of warning. Every time you finish a packet, you are no doubt aware, they put up a warning that you have to migrate over. BOINC stands for "Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing" and one of it's big innovations is the ability to run projects other than
Seti@Home - the other is to check info returned from packets for validity. I'll let the curious investigate other projects. There are three general steps with lots of details.

Of course what you should do is stop the old client from running - but don't trash the old data folder until you are done migrating - you can use some of it to help migrate if you need to. The places to look for parts to get rid of when you are ready are:

/Applications/SETI@home_Docs/
/Applications/SETI@home_OSX (the actual program)
/Library/Application\\ Support/SETI@home_Data /Library/StartupItems/(look for something with seti in the name - it's the background service that kicks in if you use it as a screensaver.)

The first place you go is http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

And even though they suggest installing the software first I suggest you do the special instructions if you are migrating from their older client and THEN install the new software. Otherwise you don't have anything to join and you will loose your old progress count. If you are starting new then follow their main directions.

The first big step is to activate the new account. If you wait for Dec 15th they will apparently migrate anyone still "active" but it may do some good to do it when you are ready rather than just on their schedule. Plan some time for the process. It can be quick and easy but it could also be a bit tortuous. I won't go through the whole
thing but I will comment on some not so obvious parts to the process. Basically it comes down to two things - first is your email address the same as registered with Seti@Home or is it different? Second - do you know your account password?

If you have both "right" then changing over to BOINC is fast and easy. If you at least recall the email address you had and have current packet run from one of the last versions of the Classic software (not OS9 necessarily, they are using this word for their older software is all.) You should be able to get them to give you your new
password while you tell them your new email address. Here's one of the gotcha's/bugs. On the form to fill out your new email address it's a bit funky - the first section says something about your current address as if seti knew it - and works that way if it's right. The second section is for your old address if you have to use that function to migrate. What is confusing is that you still have to fill out the new
address section - in other words you fill out the current email section AND the old email section. I've filled out many online forms like this but never run into one that worked this way (usually the current email info comes on up after submit or is explicitly prompted for in that section.) During the process they send you an email to confirm your registration with an account activation key/code. Keep that email
even after you've registered - it's a handy backdoor back into your account if something goes wrong.

Their directions for getting your password if you don't recall it worked well for me - turns out the user_info file has a unique ID which they can trace back to your account user name and password.

The last detail of migrating is they prompt you for various settings - default, home, work, school, etc locations are possible. They assume they can fill your hard drive which I do not recommend. I cut down how much space they are allowed to use to small proportions (they have three or four ways to figure it out.) Seti@Home has modest
space qureiments - data packets or a few hundred Kb and the programs are a few MB. However other projects can be quite substantial - and consideration should be thought through about how you are going to download hundreds of MB of data and or programs....

Being registered might mean one thing to you but it means something else to them. You do NOT have a BOINC account ( here http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/login_form.php ) but you do have a Seti@Home account- (here http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/login_form.php .) Second, registering means that your
Seti@Home account info has been migrated so you keep your history. If you don't want it then use the other prompts from the Seti@Home website.

I don't know about you but I gave up running Seti as a screensaver a while back. I had gotten used to running it as a program when I wanted it to. You can still do that - the screensaver function doesn't work. But running it as if it were a program takes alittle more work.

There are two ways to make the program work but they both begin by downloading the client and installing it. After that the key difference is whether you want to see the graphics or not. Another issue is whether you want to run the straight released client or not. You might recall Seti@Home had some problems with people altering their software - at least some people did so just to get their counts up and some did so out of an honest attempt to make the software run faster and accidently made it inaccurate. The way Seti@Home has resolved the issue is to embrace people making alterations while also checking processed packets. On the one hand they've released the source code for the programs (BOINC and Seti@Home itself) while on the other you
may not get credit for the work if they feel the packet wasn't processed right.

Here's where to get the main GUI form of the program
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php

If you stick to their program it will always be accepted (at least until they run into a bug they have to fix) and you can see the graphics. They are prettier and more dynamic. They just don't run from the screensaver always (there is one to pick but all it says is it doesn't work yet.) Alternatively you click on the unit currently working and there is a graphics button. And this software is alittle faster than the
old client. But the optimized versions people have come out with are several (like 5 to 10 times) faster but they drop the graphics option entirely at least so far.

So download, install, place the seti@home url into the project prompt (wish they would list some url's in the program - I always have to go to the internet and get the URL each time I upgrade a machine running Seti@Home.) You will need the email address and password you migrated with above. If you are going for the optimized
client (read below) then quit as soon as you've made it through the setup.

In terms of how to run the BOINC software (with the Seti@Home project you've just registered with) what I do is set the "run always" and "always connected" settings manually when I'm ready to run it instead of the "by preference settings" that you filled out above. It can hesitate some minutes when getting data packets and I've
seen it hesitate until I prompted it to try again (happened even before I tried the optimized clients.) You can pause a work unit but note the BOINC software will download and start running on another packet while you've paused the processing on that first packet (at least upto the space you've allowed on the hd.) If you really want it to stop what you do is pause a unit and quit the BOINC software. As soon as
you run it again it may well update and download a packet while every packet you had was paused.

One additional detail - if you run your computer in different places or have more than one your account online will reference more than one known machine. If you are running the software on one machine in multiple places you can ask the online account to merge the results. Each entry will appear only once actually used from that place.
Note I had two computers with much different space available and as I set my default prefs for one machine the other wouldn't start because it already had too little space available according to the rules I setup in the default prefs.

Another additional detail - I noticed various options in the setup prefs on the website about how much ram to use and when to write to disk. Seems those numbers really matter - it will grab as much ram as it can given what is available and what your pref settings are and run in ram (data and program and temp work.) Obviously the more ram you have the better but if you over commit your ram it'll force the system
to swap out ram alot. Don't commit a lot of ram unless you have a ton even if you are going to only run the program when you want to. You select how much Virtual Memory to use - I'ld suggest something smaller than their 75% default - perhaps 25%. I think their assumptions are based on either Windows or Linux rules - while my laptop kept on trucking I noticed it's virtual memory usage jumped very high.

All sounds pretty simple one way or the other at least if you've had some experience dealing with online forms and installing software and setting preferences. However it is fortunate that they've timed all this pretty close to when they released a reasonable working updated client. From what I've read they've had lot's of troubles. Even though their BOINC software has reached 5.2.13 (as of Dec 2005) for the Mac it remains plenty quasi-functional. You can get an idea from looking at the URL above for the current GUI version and the recent things they've fixed. If that's all you want you are done and don't have to read any more. If you want to process packets fastest just don't run the graphics often. If you want to process many more packets
and don't mind giving up the graphics then read on.

OPTIMIZING

If you are comfortable with the command line (CLI) client then your probably just reading this for info and I'll get to that and I'ld be interested in anything you have to offer. What I do is run the GUI client and then added the optimized Seti@Home part. Much faster, yet easy to manage - there are third party apps to work with the
packets and stats but that just adds complication to my point of view. I do use one third party part but just to keep up with stats - see way at the bottom.

Now about the optimization. All choices in optimization depend on knowing two details about your machine - the OS version you are running, and the kind of CPU. You should be able to get both kinds of info from the "About this Mac" under the blue apple in
the top left corner. If you've followed optimization issues in other areas (like in versions of Firefox) you know they've subdivided G4 CPUs into two groups. Apparently that doesn't matter with BOINC/Seti@Home at least most of the time. However with development work you are limited to what you actually have to work with - you can't
build programs for hardware or OSes you don't have. Given all that the assumptions for the optimizations are 1) you are running current versions of the OS - 10.3.9 or 10.4.2+.) And mostly they assume you are running a later G4 or G5 cpu. The later G4 means roughly 800Mhz or faster. If you are running 10.2.8 or earlier you may not find
all the parts to optimize. If you are running a G3 (traditional iMacs or iBooks) then you again may not find all the parts to optimize. Optimization seems to be mostly for those who keep current and run on better than average hardware: 10.3+ and later G4 or G5 cpus.

As for work optimizing Mac software for BOINC and Seti@Home I have only found one place - TeamNN has some programmers and they've the only work I've been able to find. They don't force you to join their team to use their software though! The three key people are "mikkyo", Alex and Rick. "Mikkyo" does optimized BOINC Manager, Alex does
more Seti@Home optimzation and Rick does more of the documentation and presentation of information for readers.

First let me state there are infact two levels of optimization. The first in chronological order is of the BOINC Manager itself. That part of the software has some work it does as packets of data are received and sent and it can indeed be optimized. The BOINC Manager application (the main program in the Applications folder) also does a benchmark based on it's own components - not dependent on the client/project you've joined. If your project work is being done much faster because
you are using an optimized client, as suggested here, then BOINC Manager may finish the work unit and ask for more work units sooner than BOINC thinks you can do. The BOINC Manager will then wait until it's time for you to get a work unit.

If you are just running BOINC every now and then you are fine. If you run over night on faster machines, or leave slower machines running for a couple days inbetween using it, then you probably need to get an optimized engine for the BOINC Manager application in order for it to think you can process work units faster.

After installing the updated main program from http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php
quit after it sets up. Then get an optimized engine - unfortunately they only have optimized engines of BOINC Manager for 10.4 (aka Tiger) right now. Pick the right CPU for you. The web page says "CLI" which is "command line interface" which some of you will know isn't the "GUI" but in this case the "GUI" is just a wrapper around the CLI
form of the program. It's the part under the hood, while the hood has nice chrome lines and a latch, so to speak. That's the engine we're swapping out. Here's where to get it:

http://members.dslextreme.com/~readerforum/forum_team/boincbeta.html

When it downloads, unstuff it. Go to your main apps folder and find the BOINC Manager program. Control click on the BOINC icon and select "Show contents".  A window will open. Double click on Contents.  Open Resources folder. Remove the file called "boinc". Place the optimized BOINC client in the resource folder and change name to "boinc". Launch BOINC Manager and under the Commands Menu see "Run Benchmarks" at the bottom - do that. It will recallibrate how often you should get data packets. Now quit again.

The second place for optimization is the Seti@Home software itself and this is the far more important part - almost all the overall time processed happens here.

The place to look for the info on the optimized Seti@Home software is
http://writhe.org.uk/seti@home/ or you can go to the Team NN discussion area and see the chatter of development. However see below for a detail.

In terms of software development there are a few stages for the consumer to note, terminology, if you will - alpha, beta, release candidate and stable/released form. Alpha means it's probably buggy and shouldn't be touched by the average user. Beta and release candidate are gray zones where things probably work but some issues may remain. Stable/Released version means that most things work most of the time. Curiously TeamNN has only alpha software but it seems a bit different from this scale of generally used terminology. I think they are doing this for two reasons - first they are still finding ways to optimize the client, and second, the "in" group is largely programmers and programmers tend to feel they are always in a alpha state (partially a joke there - note the sleep reference?) because people who really care about what they are doing always see where they are going next. In any case TeamNN's software is pretty well developed I think. I've had no problems running it for some
days. Another thing to keep in mind is they are setting a high goal for themselves - 100% acceptance of packets worked on (recall the comment above) compared to some other work I've seen where the goal is 90%+. And it seems to me from what I've read that TeamNN is running in the 99% range right now.

The released software for the Seti@Home part is Alpha 5. The above website, maintained by Rick, lists only Alpha 4. Note all this is volunteer work - the webpage sited above hasn't been updated to reflect alpha 5 so to get alpha 5 you have to go to Alex's website - http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~alexkan/seti/ (look for G4-a5 or
G5-a5) near the bottom and ignore the rest.) Rick will probably update the website soon.

There is an Alpha 6 already in the works but it's not posted anywhere yet and probably is truely alpha software whereas the released Alpha software is probably more a near released candidate version except they keep coming up with new optimizations (the same notice about the a5 version being posted mentioned the a6 version coming soon.)

In any case, to go from the detault Seti@Home client to the optimized one is pretty easy and their instructions work fine - just find the old engine in /Library/Applications Support/BOINC Data/projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu/ and move out the setiathome_4.18_powerpc-apple-darwin file there and replace it with the two other files from the unzipped optimized client download. Ignore any other files- they are data packets and or partially processed results. If you have gotten some time on a packet, after swapping the engine parts launch the BOINC Manager and abort that
packet - it'll be rejected anyway as it'll know it's been processed differently between the two parts. No biggy that you've aborted a packet. They note it in your record but I've not seen any issues from doing so.

Happy packet chewing!

With this combination of the 5.2.13 mainstream gui BOINC manager and the optimined G4-a5 Seti@Home client (for version 4.18) I process 1 data packet in less than 3 hrs, usually right near 1hr 45 minutes, on a 1.25Ghz laptop. Much much better than the
8-12 hrs I was running before!

For the folks running Tiger (10.4) after running all your system updates I recommend getting the Widget called SetiStats - it's a lot easier to get your counts that way than logging in over the internet. You get the info it needs about finding your stats when you log into the seti@home website for your account info - it'll list your
"Account number" which is different from your login ID (which is now your email address) and your activation code (which is the most fundamental part of being a registered user.)

As for updates, and this is the measure of the inner-geek, you have to keep an eye out for updates and deal with assembling some of the parts yourself. Compiling the program requires the most specialized knowledge and support stuff (versions of OSes and hardware for example.) But if your inner geek is speaking to you, you should be
able to follow the content of this guide and note what parts go where once the kind programmers have chewed on the source code.

As the product(s) mature and new features and optimizations slow down, there will be time to create variations for different OSes and hardware combinations, and installers that "just work" so average folk can use them. That is still the goal as getting the most seti (or other projects) chewed on in large part depends on getting the most people to run well, rather than just a few with afterburners hooked up.

---

= - - - - - - - =
Steven Kolins
mailto:smkolins->mac(.)com
http://homepage.mac.com/smkolins/
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!

Steven has written a great guide, especially on the "how to" optimization part, but I'd like to clarify a couple of points.

They assume they can fill your hard drive which I do not recommend. I cut down how much space they are allowed to use to small proportions (they have three or four ways to figure it out.)

Unless you are going to run Climateprediction (CPDN), which uses your "extra" hard drive space as well as your "extra" CPU cycles, none of the present projects will take up more than a few megabytes. All of that stuff on the website was put there for CPDN. Looking at mine right now (running a 'medium' cache), SETI takes 2MB, Predictor 14, Einstein 16, Rosetta 25, and CPDN 1090. HOWEVER. The preferences page for disk space is very poorly worded. People trying to "limit" the space BOINC can take for things _other_ than CPDN _frequently_ wind up with "you need more disk space" errors, when there is still plenty of space available, simply because all the options (especially "leave x% free") don't work the way they expect. It is not unusual to have someone say "well, I told BOINC it could have 2GB of my 100GB drive, it's using way less than 1 but saying it needs more". _MY_ recommendation is to just give BOINC "plenty" of space, to avoid problems. The defaults are fine. You can see how much it's taking on the "Disk" tab, and if that _is_ too much, then you can cut it back, or reduce the number of projects you're running. The BOINC Wiki contains a ton of information on all of this, but _may_ not be totally up to date on the disk preferences part; there was a bug in BOINC 4.x where it didn't do the calculation of your available space correctly. When V5.x came out, it did, and people started having the disk space errors because of their settings. In investigating all of those errors, we learned more about the disk stuff, and that new info may not have made it to the Wiki yet.

Another additional detail - I noticed various options in the setup prefs on the website about how much ram to use and when to write to disk.

There is no way to set "how much RAM" is used. You can set how much Virtual Memory is used, but reducing this too far, while reducing disk access, will also slow down or stop BOINC processing, and makes very little difference to other programs. Mine is at 50%; 25% is cutting it pretty close to the edge. Steven didn't say anything about the "Leave applications in memory" option, but PLEASE leave that at "Yes"!!! If you later think it's causing a problem, ASK US before you change it. A "No" setting there flat causes problems. And on the "Write to disk at most every" setting, it is not good to make that more than 360 seconds, especially if you have "leave in memory" set to "no". Again, ask first, or read the Wiki and make an informed decision that you are willing to lose work, because you just "must" change these settings.

You can still do that - the screensaver function doesn't work.

Here Steven loses me. The screensaver works just fine on my Macs, and I haven't heard any complaints of it not working. I've heard many complaints that it's ugly, but that also implies that it's working. (The fix, at least partly, for the "ugly" part, is also in the Wiki.)

On the optimized SETI application and BOINC Core Client available from Team MacNN - I use the optimized SETI app (alpha-5), and I _have_ used (but no longer do) the optimized Client. For various reasons that would take pages to explain, I would strongly recommend you NOT install the optimized BOINC Client until/unless you need it. If you don't know if you need it, then you don't.

Again, almost all of this is covered quite thoroughly in the Wiki "in general" - Steven has given some very helpful "specifics", such as the current state of the signup process, and the Team MacNN details. The Wiki is "Windows-centric" (although the prime editor, and I, are both Mac people, and we're trying to stay caught up...) but is "the" definitive source for info on the BOINC part. And if anything confuses you, or anything just "doesn't work", PLEASE feel free to ask questions on these boards. I know the SETI/BOINC boards have a "bad reputation" on the Classic SETI boards - but this is in large part because of the people who have in the past come over here screaming "BOINC sucks!", and not been willing to listen to anything that might differ from that opinion. BOINC is complicated, and the UCB "documentation" is almost non-existent. That's why the Wiki was created, and why so many of us are here willing to help.

Steven has written a great guide, especially on the "how to" optimization part, but I'd like to clarify a couple of points.

Thanks!

They assume they can fill your hard drive which I do not recommend. I cut down how much space they are allowed to use to small proportions (they have three or four ways to figure it out.)

Unless you are going to run Climateprediction (CPDN), which uses your "extra" hard drive space as well as your "extra" CPU cycles, none of the present projects will take up more than a few megabytes.

Actually I saw posts about the climate change project, which maybe just closed. In any case leaving a many MB seems fine. Leaving a possibility of many GB seems a bit extreme. Errors happen.

The preferences page for disk space is very poorly worded. People trying to "limit" the space BOINC can take for things _other_ than CPDN _frequently_ wind up with "you need more disk space" errors, when there is still plenty of space available, simply because all the options (especially "leave x% free") don't work the way they expect.

I agree it was a bit weird to have several ways to define the space and it would be too easy to make a bad choice.

The BOINC Wiki contains a ton of information... and that new info may not have made it to the Wiki yet.

Well we could see about making some additions there. The Macintosh section seems entirely empty.

Another additional detail - I noticed various options in the setup prefs on the website about how much ram to use and when to write to disk.

There is no way to set "how much RAM" is used. You can set how much Virtual Memory is used, but reducing this too far, while reducing disk access, will also slow down or stop BOINC processing, and makes very little difference to other programs. Mine is at 50%; 25% is cutting it pretty close to the edge.[/quote]

I can't recall exactly what I saw and setiathome is getting loaded up (I hope I can post this...) so I can't get to my prefs to see what I was looking at - but VM certainly isn't far...

Does the VM calculation relate to the theoretical (such as listed in the "top" command) or the real (actual swap file(s) in /var/vm/)??

I don't have a strong argument about 25% vs 50%.... Again, I was just aiming at more reasonable choices than letting a program doing it's own thing.

Steven didn't say anything about the "Leave applications in memory" option, but PLEASE leave that at "Yes"!!! If you later think it's causing a problem, ASK US before you change it.

My intention was to focus on settings that vary from defaults. I agree programs and data run fastest when in ram. Writing to the hd doesn't seem to be a big issue (I suppose if you don't write for a long time you not only run the risk of running into some kind of ram limit but also loosing work done if the program is interupted.

You can still do that - the screensaver function doesn't work.

Here Steven loses me. The screensaver works just fine on my Macs, and I haven't heard any complaints of it not working.

Hmm... have to take a second look. I had read some comments that I thought were recent and weren't related to the optimized clients.... The few times I tried on my own it reported not having graphics but I guess it does that at certain points anyway. However with the optimized clients I don't think they work....

On the optimized SETI application and BOINC Core Client available from Team MacNN - I use the optimized SETI app (alpha-5), and I _have_ used (but no longer do) the optimized Client. For various reasons that would take pages to explain, I would strongly recommend you NOT install the optimized BOINC Client until/unless you need it. If you don't know if you need it, then you don't.

As they've redone their BOINC client builds with the current 5.2.13, I'ld wonder if they are still problematic from your pov. The argument presented was that BOINC was monitoring how many packets you could process and if you ran much faster it would hold back on work units until the client felt like going ahead based on it's metrics.

Again, almost all of this is covered quite thoroughly in the Wiki "in general" - Steven has given some very helpful "specifics", such as the current state of the signup process, and the Team MacNN details. The Wiki is "Windows-centric" (although the prime editor, and I, are both Mac people, and we're trying to stay caught up...)

The Wiki documentation wasn't that easy to find, and since the Macintosh section was just empty.... But I'll try to read it more....

and...

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= - - - - - - - =
Steven Kolins
mailto:smkolins->mac(.)com
http://homepage.mac.com/smkolins/
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!

Unless you are going to run Climateprediction (CPDN), which uses your "extra" hard drive space as well as your "extra" CPU cycles, none of the present projects will take up more than a few megabytes.

Actually I saw posts about the climate change project, which maybe just closed. In any case leaving a many MB seems fine. Leaving a possibility of many GB seems a bit extreme. Errors happen.

CPDN hasn't closed - it's taking 1.15GB of my drive as we speak! :-) When errors happen, it is likely to be with something like the app getting into an infinite loop writing to the stderr.txt files - and that isn't going to be "caught" by the preference settings. One person on one project (not SETI) just reported that she had a 3GB error file. I fully agree that there is no need to "allow" gigabytes, but "playing it too close" is just known to cause people to post to the boards "I can't get work"... then when we finally track it down, the Messages tab is saying "Not enough disk space". If you look over on the Einstein boards, there is a whole set of threads on the topic.

I agree it was a bit weird to have several ways to define the space and it would be too easy to make a bad choice.

Yes...

The BOINC Wiki contains a ton of information... and that new info may not have made it to the Wiki yet.

Well we could see about making some additions there. The Macintosh section seems entirely empty.

????? The "install" section is, I know - because it was a "moving target", with all the V5.2.x versions (13 as of today) that were coming out. If anything else is lacking, please, let us know and Paul or I (or some other editor) will get it in there!

Does the VM calculation relate to the theoretical (such as listed in the "top" command) or the real (actual swap file(s) in /var/vm/)??

I don't have a strong argument about 25% vs 50%.... Again, I was just aiming at more reasonable choices than letting a program doing it's own thing.

The answer is "it depends". V5.x does a "better" job of reporting disk and virtual memory usage than 4.x did. I don't know if it's better, but it's different. Does it match top or swap file size? I really don't know.

Steven didn't say anything about the "Leave applications in memory" option, but PLEASE leave that at "Yes"!!! If you later think it's causing a problem, ASK US before you change it.

My intention was to focus on settings that vary from defaults. I agree programs and data run fastest when in ram. Writing to the hd doesn't seem to be a big issue (I suppose if you don't write for a long time you not only run the risk of running into some kind of ram limit but also loosing work done if the program is interupted.

It's far more than that. One project flat crashes if it's switched out and not left in memory - they're chasing the bug. Others lose anywhere from a "little" time to the entire HOUR, because of the way they checkpoint.

Here Steven loses me. The screensaver works just fine on my Macs, and I haven't heard any complaints of it not working.

Hmm... have to take a second look. I had read some comments that I thought were recent and weren't related to the optimized clients.... The few times I tried on my own it reported not having graphics but I guess it does that at certain points anyway. However with the optimized clients I don't think they work....

Yes, with optimized SETI clients, there's no screensaver. I _now_ have heard two reports of the SETI screensaver not working, still trying to solve them. Some projects don't have graphics, and all you get is a scrolling "x% complete" message.

As they've redone their BOINC client builds with the current 5.2.13, I'ld wonder if they are still problematic from your pov. The argument presented was that BOINC was monitoring how many packets you could process and if you ran much faster it would hold back on work units until the client felt like going ahead based on it's metrics.

This is a very small part of why to run the optimized client though, and with anything past V4.72, is really a non-issue as all of the projects _should_ be using the Duration Correction Factor when downloading work. If they don't, then instead of a 2-day cache, you can set it to a 2.5-day cache, or whatever. The main point of the optimized BOINC Core Client is to inflate the benchmarks. If that is done to compensate for "low" benchmarks compared to the application you're running (such as SETI alpha-5) that's fine. If its done to "cheat" and request more credits than you should be getting, it's not. If you run multiple projects, where some are optimized and some are not, you have to decide for yourself when it is "ethical" to run one and when it isn't. My own decision was that when I moved my emphasis from SETI and Einstein (both Altivec-optimized apps) to Rosetta, which is NOT optimized in the least, I was asking for (and getting) "too much" credit there. So I uninstalled the optimized client.

The Wiki documentation wasn't that easy to find, and since the Macintosh section was just empty.... But I'll try to read it more....

Sigh. Because it was "not invented here" (at UCB) and because UCB doesn't "control" the content, they are hesitant to "promote" it. If they'd provide even halfway decent documentation of their own, that would be fine. But when they provide _zilch_, and the best they'll do is put a tiny link to the Wiki on the homepage, but not mention it in the email, etc...

I'll definitely make _this_ offer: anything you find missing, that you want to write up to put in the Wiki, I'll edit, run past Paul, and put it in there! You can email it directly to me at (from my screenname here) firstname dot lastname at comcast dot net. If for whatever reason I'm not around or don't reply, Paul's email address is in the Wiki, and he's a frequent poster to the Number Crunching board.

Thanks again!

I struggled for a few hours migrating over to BOINC and the new seti screensaver. The key to my eventual success was realizing three things I culled from various message boards. I'm happily crunching lots of work units now. These points may be obvious to some people, but they weren't to me, and to many other folks, too, apparently.
In no particular order:
1. The BOINC Manager is not BOINC itself. It simply—duh—manages the BOINC application.
2. The preferences for BOINC's behavior lie online at seti@home's site (as "General Preferences"). The BOINC Manager app's Commands menu lets you override the General Prefs, or not. If you set BOINC in the General Preferences to, for example, activate after five minutes of inactivity, that's exactly what it'll do, as long as BOINC Manager is set to Run Based on Preferences.
3. The seti@home screensaver works fine for Mac, but it works differently than the Classic version. It does not start BOINC running -- it merely provides a graphic window onto what BOINC's doing. So, if you have BOINC set to start after a minute of inactivity, and you manually invoke the screensaver, you'll see a message about BOINC being idle or suspended. Wait a minute, and when BOINC starts, the screensaver will have something to show you. This non-invoking behavior has apparently confused a lot of people.
Hope these dumb observations help.

3. The seti@home screensaver works fine for Mac, but it works differently than the Classic version. It does not start BOINC running -- it merely provides a graphic window onto what BOINC's doing. So, if you have BOINC set to start after a minute of inactivity, and you manually invoke the screensaver, you'll see a message about BOINC being idle or suspended. Wait a minute, and when BOINC starts, the screensaver will have something to show you. This non-invoking behavior has apparently confused a lot of people.

One correction/addition to this... the screensaver will not OVERRIDE your preferences, so if you have a delay set on the website, the screensaver will also have this delay. However, if BOINC Manager is not running at all, the screensaver _will_ start the BOINC background process if it needs to. So if you want your Mac to do BOINC only when the screensaver is running (and use the screensaver settings to control when) you can set the preferences to "run always", and just not run BOINC Manager at startup. The screensaver will start things going when it kicks in.

In other words - _either_ BOINC Manager _or_ the screensaver can run BOINC. But the web preferences overrule anything else.

Thanks for the tips - these are things that once you know them, you don't think to pass along, they're "obvious"... but until you know them the first time, they aren't obvious at all!

I'll add just a couple more things. SETI is not BOINC and BOINC is not SETI. Two different sets of software, two different sets of goals. They do share a "home" at UCB and some of the same people work on both. BOINC is funded, SETI runs on donations. BOINC is the "platform" that supports many Distributed Computing projects. SETI is one of these projects, whose goal is finding E.T. As I write this, SETI is having upload/download problems, and people are screaming that "BOINC doesn't work!". Everyone who has more than one project attached knows better, BOINC is doing just fine, crunching away at Einstein and Rosetta and CPDN and, and... It is SETI that is having problems. So PLEASE attach to more than one project. If you don't see one you _want_ to contribute a lot of time to, then find one you "don't hate", and give it a very small resource share. Then when SETI is down, your computer will at least have something to do other than twiddle it's electronic thumbs.

And, although I've said it before... "The Wiki is your friend." Any question imaginable, any error message you get, any problem you have. Put some words in the search field and you are likely to find _something_ about what you're looking for. If the standard search doesn't work, use the Google search on the Wiki home page; it searches the same data, but uses a different algorithm, so sometimes one works better than the other. The "getting started" guide there may be Windows-centric, but it contains a lot of information that is just as true for the Mac. These boards are your friends, too; especially Number Crunching. There is a search off of the "Community" page, and almost anything possible that can go wrong, has, and someone has already asked about it. I _would_ warn you to note the dates on anything you find, though... someone yesterday added to a thread that was six months old, just saying "I have this problem too" (which was fixed several versions back, so their problem must actually be different), someone else, answering, didn't notice the date on the earlier posts, which listed the version, and their answer was "You're running an _ancient_ version! Update!".

Thanks for all the feedback. I've done the initial work to post the Wiki area and when I can get some time together I'll repost a modified version of the above through there and see what makes it past editors. Lot's of conventions to use...

In the meantime, I've learned a couple more things.

First, Boinc Menubar and Boinc Manager work very differently - so differently that switching between is effectively impossible as using one dumps everything the other has setup. Seems pretty extreme to me but my laptop's processing was nill until I joined Einstein@home because Seti@Home was still processing it's recent changes/problems. Then suddenly I was back and could reconnect with Boinc Manager when I reinstalled that. Heartbreaking couple of days but now it's passed and the news is - don't switch back and forth.

Additionally I think there is still some wierdness in managing space. Not sure of all the details but generally I had to boost allowed space to 750MB (0.75GB by the prefs() before Seti@Home and Einstein@Home would work. Otherwise most often it just sat there and after many tries a message would come bakc I had to free up 50-odd MB. I had been allowing 100MB, then bumped to 500MB when I added Einstein@home, and now I'm at 750MB for both projects. But the OS and the Disk Space calculation report around 19MB being used. That doesn't make much sense unless there are some hidden temp files somewhere?? Anyone else have thoughts?

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Steven Kolins
mailto:smkolins->mac(.)com
http://homepage.mac.com/smkolins/
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!

First, Boinc Menubar and Boinc Manager work very differently

Yes, and it's a pain... personally, I wish the Menubar was just a 'cut down' version of the Manager, such that you could actually RUN the Manager on the system when you needed to "micromanage", without requiring it for the rest of the time...

Additionally I think there is still some wierdness in managing space.

You too, huh? :-) You talk about letting it have 'x' MB, but that is not where the problem is for most people. The problem is in the "% free". You can restrict it down to just barely more than it actually takes, using all the "hard number" options - but you'd better allow it a larger percentage than you think reasonable on the "%" setting, or it's not going to work. And if a project has to download a new version of the science application it needs space, AND there has to be room for _several_ temporary copies of the application at any given time in the Slots directories, AND... it's not _just_ the results being downloaded and uploaded that matter. But I agree that the current calculation is wrong somewhere.

Unless you are going to run Climateprediction (CPDN)...

Which brings up the question of what projects allow Macs to partitipate, and the status of their software.

Seti@Home, yes, optimization is a custom addition
Einstein@Home, yes, optimization is included
climateprediction.net, yes, no known optimzation version (it does say minimum 10.3 OS which hints there is a possibility?)
Predictor@Home, yes, no comment on optimization
Rosetta@home, yes, ditto
SZTAKI Desktop Grid, yes, ditto...

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Steven Kolins
mailto:smkolins->mac(.)com
http://homepage.mac.com/smkolins/
Possess a pure, kindly and radiant heart!