All Over (Dec 10 2008)

During the wee hours this morning our upload server (bruno) froze. We are still unsure why, but recovery was a comedy of errors. Jeff was already about to power cycle it (having little other choice given the unresponsive console) when I got in around 8am. After rebooting bruno failed to mount its result storage drives due to some kind of mdadm mismanagement. This forced us into a read-only please-fsck-your-drives mode. The drives, outside of pointless resyncing due to hard power cycle, were fine - they didn't need to be fsck'ed. Still, being root (/) was read-only we couldn't edit /etc/fstab to prevent this from happening again upon every reboot.

So I tried to get it into a real single user mode to make such an edit - all I wanted to do was comment out that one mount line. However, thus started a series of about 8 consecutive reboots, each taking about five minutes, and all wastes of time due to a typo or an unresponsive kvm. I ultimately gave up and booted from DVD in "rescue mode" where I could finally make the fstab edit. Finally all was well with the mount (which I did on the command line), but then I had all kinds of network errors with the system. More tweaks, more reboots... Long story short this server is being held together with figurative duct tape at the moment. We'll get it all sorted out later.

Jeff and I also worked together to get the remaining pieces of the "donation drive" in place, such as it is. I'm sending out test e-mails out now, and will probably start sending in earnest on Friday. Please send all questions/comments about our fundraising efforts to the principal investigators (Dan, Dave, Eric). I am simply implementing the technical aspects of this endeavor, though I would like to point out we finally updated the text on the plans page.

By the way.. did anybody notice this?

- Matt
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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

About the gpu app...
5-10x faster than stock or opti app?
Also is it only in beta right now?
~BoB
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Do you Good Search for Seti@Home? http://www.goodsearch.com/?charityid=888957
Or Good Shop? http://www.goodshop.com/?charityid=888957

Rudimentary, very preliminary, standalone tests here say, on my rather ordinary 8600GT, about 6x faster than AKv8SSE4.1 running on my dual core E8400@3.6GHz... naturally though I'd like to be running all three apps at the same time, but will have to poke around with that another day ;D
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"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change."
Charles Darwin

Rudimentary, very preliminary, standalone tests here say, on my rather ordinary 8600GT, about 6x faster than AKv8SSE4.1 running on my dual core E8400@3.6GHz... naturally though I'd like to be running all three apps at the same time, but will have to poke around with that another day ;D

Retracted previous statement.

Right now I'm not seeing much of a difference between this and AK V8 SSSE3 in the first half of processing, but it does go 5-10x faster in the end half. But remember, this is a different project from the official S@H. If you're encouraged to do it, your RAC will count for the Beta project, not the official one.

And honestly, why is it asking for so much work?

Folding optimized their engine to use 100% of the GPU power, nearly using up every processing thread related to the GPU. I'm not seeing that right now for the first half of WU processing taking 24 minutes but then sharply speeds up at the end to finish the WU in 30 minutes. There should be optimizations for the entire length of the WU processing.
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What if Fiction was Fact and Fact was Fiction and vice versa?

Retracted previous statement.

Right now I'm not seeing much of a difference between this and AK V8 SSSE3 in the first half of processing, but it does go 5-10x faster in the end half. But remember, this is a different project from the official S@H. If you're encouraged to do it, your RAC will count for the Beta project, not the official one.

And honestly, why is it asking for so much work?

Folding optimized their engine to use 100% of the GPU power, nearly using up every processing thread related to the GPU. I'm not seeing that right now for the first half of WU processing taking 24 minutes but then sharply speeds up at the end to finish the WU in 30 minutes. There should be optimizations for the entire length of the WU processing.

There should be optimizations for the entire length of the WU processing.

I`m not sure if i`m doing it wrong. Was using AKv8SSE4.1 with APv5.0SSE3 optimized apps. I installed new BOINC and my GPU was detected propely. Is it enough or do i have to revert to stock apps that come with the 6.4.5 BOINC?
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You have to join the Beta program, attach your BOINC Manager to the URL "http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/beta/" to join the beta. Then you'll have access to the CUDA program.

It's also worth noting that your login doesn't cross-over between the official and the beta. You'll have to create a new account.

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Retracted previous statement.

Right now I'm not seeing much of a difference between this and AK V8 SSSE3 in the first half of processing, but it does go 5-10x faster in the end half. But remember, this is a different project from the official S@H. If you're encouraged to do it, your RAC will count for the Beta project, not the official one.

And honestly, why is it asking for so much work?

Folding optimized their engine to use 100% of the GPU power, nearly using up every processing thread related to the GPU. I'm not seeing that right now for the first half of WU processing taking 24 minutes but then sharply speeds up at the end to finish the WU in 30 minutes. There should be optimizations for the entire length of the WU processing.

Shouldn't your concerns and question be on the SetiBeta pages?

Matt, is the GPU app in Beta truly being tested with Adaptive Replication turned on or is it just that the <target_nresults> in the APP record for setiathome_enhanced has been left at 2 so testers can't see workunit details? If that entry, and the similar one for astropulse, could be reduced to 1 or 0 then participants would have a better view of what's happening.

For the record, I have *zero* idea what's going on with the CUDA/SETI@home beta project, except that it now exists and I was just merely pointing out its existence. Please forward all comments/questions to the beta forum, which I assume is being read by the beta developers. Sorry for any confusion.

- Matt
____________
-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

For the record, I have *zero* idea what's going on with the CUDA/SETI@home beta project, except that it now exists and I was just merely pointing out its existence. Please forward all comments/questions to the beta forum, which I assume is being read by the beta developers. Sorry for any confusion.

- Matt

. . . Richard - i believe there are Forums etc @ CUDA that one can Post to there.

[. . . ok - and there's a lot of Postings by Jord here that may well enable one to get to the 'right individuals' ?

< Contact Jord [Ageless] ?