Lunatics Windows Installer v0.40 release notes

I have noticed huge blanking in almost all AP wu

What does cause the blanking
Radio interference? Sun giving out huge blasts of solar radiation?

I am not sure what is blanking but in AP tasks that I have been doing with NV r555 GPU the normal run time is usually under 2 hours. All the ones I have don with blanking high have taken 3 hours to do


They all run high priority under 7.0.24 x64


Michael Miles

Have you tried Nvidia system tools current ver is AFAIK 6.06 on Nvidia site
of NvidiaInspector? Either will allow user to set clocks etc.

I used the latter to downclock my 560's for a bit when the temps got to high:-)

Also I've had some problems with that driver under Win7, every now and then it just quits for no apparent reason, you get a blank screen, driver reloads and Boinc restarts apps, but with warning about no output files found and if problem persists project reset might be required..

But otherwise no problems:-)

Cheers,

Have you tried Nvidia system tools current ver is AFAIK 6.06 on Nvidia site
of NvidiaInspector? Either will allow user to set clocks etc.

I used the latter to downclock my 560's for a bit when the temps got to high:-)

Also I've had some problems with that driver under Win7, every now and then it just quits for no apparent reason, you get a blank screen, driver reloads and Boinc restarts apps, but with warning about no output files found and if problem persists project reset might be required..

But otherwise no problems:-)

Cheers,

Oh this You'll love the PCI-E bus was being throttled, I had to dig thru Nvidia Inspectors 2nd panel, but once I set that control to off, the gpu went from 553MHz to 630MHz! Instantly in fact, go figure.
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I have noticed huge blanking in almost all AP wu

What does cause the blanking
Radio interference? Sun giving out huge blasts of solar radiation?

I have noticed huge blanking in almost all AP wu

What does cause the blanking
Radio interference? Sun giving out huge blasts of solar radiation?

Military radar usually. It has been somewhat well-documented in the tech news posts over the past 2-3 years. The staff knew there was radar there and there wasn't anything that could be done about it for a while. Then a very smart/clever person figured out that it uses a very predictable pattern, so the data can be marked where the radar is interfering and thus.. we have our blanking.

There may be other sources of interference, but I'm pretty sure radar is the major source.

And yes, I have also had a lot of high-blanked APs. Crunched and returned 31 APs as of right now and according to my spreadsheet, I finally have the 10 needed for the good ETA estimates. Problem is that I just have to wait for wingmen to crunch their half and report.

Radar is certainly the prime offender, and there are two separate ways of dealing with its effects.

First, before the data is split it goes through an examination which combines channels and looks for known radar patterns. A signal is put on a 15th channel indicating where the patterns are seen, then as the data is being loaded for splitting those sections are replaced with pseudo random data shaped to fit the frequency profile of the good parts of the data. There's no indication in the WUs produced during the splitting what sections are real and what replaced, though.

Second, if there's a <remove_radar>1</remove_radar> element in an AP WU header, the application does an analysis which senses RFI by its tendency to add a DC component. That analysis makes a list of where in the 32 Mebisamples there are 128 sample sections with DC above a threshold. (While an AP task is being crunched, that list is in the slot directory as indices.txt.) For each such section, the application considers the preceding and following 400000 samples bad. In cases where there are enough to effectively mark all the data as bad, the application exits with the "...Blanking too much RFI?" message. Otherwise, searching for pulses commences, but for any data chunk being analyzed which is considered bad, that chunk is replaced with the same kind of pseudo random shaped data as used server-side. The application keeps track of how much data it has replaced and writes the <fraction_blanked> in the result file, Lunatics apps also put it in stderr as percent blanked.






Thanks for the very detailed answer.


Have a great day


Michael Miles

If you have a CPU with SSE2 and above but not AVX the r557 MAY be faster.
We have indication that on most hosts r557 is faster but no guarantees.

ummm The only reason that it is faster is the SSE2. I'm willing to be that since your CPU doesn't have AVX you are basically just running it off the SSE2 portion of the app
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Radar is certainly the prime offender, and there are two separate ways of dealing with its effects.

First, before the data is split it goes through an examination which combines channels and looks for known radar patterns. A signal is put on a 15th channel indicating where the patterns are seen, then as the data is being loaded for splitting those sections are replaced with pseudo random data shaped to fit the frequency profile of the good parts of the data. There's no indication in the WUs produced during the splitting what sections are real and what replaced, though.

Second, if there's a <remove_radar>1</remove_radar> element in an AP WU header, the application does an analysis which senses RFI by its tendency to add a DC component. That analysis makes a list of where in the 32 Mebisamples there are 128 sample sections with DC above a threshold. (While an AP task is being crunched, that list is in the slot directory as indices.txt.) For each such section, the application considers the preceding and following 400000 samples bad. In cases where there are enough to effectively mark all the data as bad, the application exits with the "...Blanking too much RFI?" message. Otherwise, searching for pulses commences, but for any data chunk being analyzed which is considered bad, that chunk is replaced with the same kind of pseudo random shaped data as used server-side. The application keeps track of how much data it has replaced and writes the <fraction_blanked> in the result file, Lunatics apps also put it in stderr as percent blanked.






Thanks for the very detailed answer.


Have a great day


Michael Miles

How many people have posted in this thread? Without counting, I'd guess at fewer than 20. What do the other 660 think?

I only do MB work, so i haven't bothered with the latest release as it doesn't affect me.

The advantage of the Lunatics installer is that allows pretty much anyone to install an optimised application without having to muck around manually copying & editing files. Adding yet more options, command line switches & other refinements detracts from the whole point of the installer IMHO. It's meant to make things simple, not more complicated.
I think at most you might want to have a screen during setup that mentions that some people may have some issues, and point them to the readme file for more information.

I'm happy with things the way they are at present- i ran the installer, edited the config file to run 2 WUs at a time on the GPU & then just let it do it's thing. If people want to reserve a Core or tweak other settings to get another .5% boost in throughput then they can go for it. But i wouldn't have those options as part of the installer.
Just tell people at the start (and end for those with short memories) of the installation to read the readme file for known issues, and their possible work arounds.

First get GPUz and CPUz if you are unsure what gpu or CPU instruction set your CPU can run.

Next just try to run the installer. it takes several steps before it actually starts installing anything. You get to choose what apps you want and it creates an app_info for your install.

Once it is done it will restart your BOINC manager and you should see different apps running in your windows task manager.


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