Greetings everyone! I just joined yesterday and I've been reading documentation and watching videos about SETI@home.

I think this is a great endeavor and the idea of asking volunteers to contribute their computing power to the effort is a perfect way of doing this; mine is running at this very moment. I understand we're effectively up to a few Petaflops now?

I just have a few basic questions.

I understand that the radio signals SETI@home analyzes are not known to be naturally occurring, but what if they actually are? Might we actually be analyzing a new type of star?

If we don't find any evidence of aliens does the analysis done by SETI@home at least find other things that might be useful to us, like new stars/pulsars?

Are there maps/progress reports to see the current total work SETI@home has done?

Because I don't have the credit to post in Einstein@home, I'll ask here. The first task I received is still running after 17 and a half hours and its only at 14% using only .5 CPU and my 1 GPU. It says the computation size is 450,000 GFLOPS. Is this normal for that kind of task?

Thanks in advance!

-Robert

Robert,

I think a lot of your questions are best answered in a talk given by Dr. Eric Korpela.


CLICK HERE

Robert, let me start off by saying that I am no expert.

However, if my GPU task was taking 17 hours to complete, I would suspect that something is going wrong.

Did that task ever complete?

Robert if your talking about Einstein project units yes they do take longer to complete . I don't have a Raidon GPU so I can't tell you how long it would take but my GTX650 did take a long time to complete units I think approx. 9hrs maybe longer .

Also you have a i3 with 4 cores so how are you using 5cpu's and 1 GPU ?

I would turn Hypa threading off and leave 1 core free to feed the GPU and you should see a improvement

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Also when you think it's fixed you can do more than 1 GPU units with Einstein goto the settings for the project and you will see a setting for GPU set it to 0.5 for 2 units and 0.33 for 3 units but I would advise only 2

part of your prob is I think Hyper Threading turned on in the M/B BIOS turn this off for Seti and Einstein
and leave 1cpu core free to feed the GPU

they take time but 14% in 17hrs no way turn Hyper Threading OFF

I have A AMD FX 8350 with 8 core and 8 threads but I have HYPER Threading off (actually no setting on M/b ) so I only see 8 as you would say CPU's (cores)

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Robert I just looked at your cpu you have a I3 2100 this cpu only has 2 cores but has 4 Threads

This is your problem for shore you should only be doing 2 cpu (cores) units and 2 units on your GPU not 5 cpu's and 1 GPU your asking it to do to much

In your case with Hyper Thread turnd on your cutting the speed of your CPU down to only 1.55 gig or less in real time

Hyper Thread takes the Cpu and shears the speed over all 4 threads + 2 cores so it effectively slows how much time it spends on each Thread or core at any given time so 3.1 gig per core divided by at least 2 = 1.55 gig

hope this is not to complicated

Basically you have to turn the Hyper Theading off

2 units on 2 cores and 1 or 2 units on the GPU

so max you can do is 3-4 units at one time no more or it will slow down

are you also having a bit of a heating problem ? you should be unless you got a good heat sink on it I would be expecting it to get temp near the max of the cpu the way you got it setup .

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Here is what my BOINC is reporting:


http://imgur.com/0IDKBfe


My computer isn't over heating:


http://imgur.com/2cXpqYX

Turning SETI@home off and letting just Einstien run was slightly better.

As of now, the ONE AND ONLY Einstein@home task has been running for 38 hours and its 32%. Can't explain why it says .5 CPUs and 1 ATI GPU. SETI@home is running 4 different tasks at the same time.

I just joined so I'm not ready to question BOINC yet. Maybe Einstein@home is a much more complicated computation than SETI@home. Maybe because SETI is already running 4 tasks but no GPU, BOINC decided to run Einstein with half a CPU and my one and only GPU.

Looks like he's crunching APs on that GPU but only has 0.038 of a Core to support it. That explains why he's taking so long to crunch that AP. He also has 4 work units on all the cores. So he's starving that GPU. Since it's been forever since I've run stock apps, I don't remember what Seti normally gives for ratio of CPU to GPU for the APs. The Temp on that GPU is running 70C on AP. Which means it's much higher if he does any Multibeams. So there might be a heating issue when he crunches those.

Einstein is paused at the moment that pic was taken. So the computer is switching back and forth between the 2 projects. That is why it seems longer than normal.


Zalster

My HD6370M in my notebook runs about 6 hours for a SETI@home AP task with about 10-15 minutes of CPU time. With your GPU being rated at 200-240 GFLOPS vs mine at 120GFLOPS I would imagine your AP tasks would run much faster and use less CPU time.

Perhaps the driver set you are using is not the most ideal. Which could also be true for the Einstein work.

The Cat 13.1 set is bad as it has an OpenCL runtime compiler bug. It might apply to all projects that run OpenCL. I am not sure, but probably.

Looking at the tasks you have complete. You have a version of drivers anywhere from Cat 12.6 to 13.4 & a really old OpenCL runtime from 11.6.

I would suggest shutting down BOINC. Uninstall the video package and clean out your old driver with some tools to get rid of the old junk. Display Driver Uninstaller has been suggested before as a good tool to use.

Then freshly install drivers. The current Cat 14.4 should be OK.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
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Also new to Seti.

I don’t know if I have a problem or not. I have been running SETI for several weeks on the GPU on my laptop. The computer has Core i5-3230M CPU @ 2.60GHz [Family 6 Model 58 Stepping 9] Number of processors 4 Coprocessors and AMD AMD Radeon HD 6570/6670/7570/7670 series (Turks) (1024MB) driver: 1.4.1848 OpenCL: 1.2 Operating System Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64 Edition, Service Pack 1

WU 3mr09ab.2935.438086664206.12.109_0 has been running for 29 hours and is only 59% complete. Most WU’s finish in 2 or 3 hours at the most. Is this one defective in some way? Should I keep running it to the end? Will it finish or is it stuck in some way?

A few more details. The graphic says that the WU is running on 0.115 CPU + 1 ATI GPU. The rest of the 4 CPU’s are fully occupied running 4 ClimatePrediction Models. The computer has 8 GB’s of RAM.

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You could try suspending that work unit then restarting it and see if that causes it to pick up. Sometimes they get stuck. Hard to really say if there is a problem with your computer as only 2 work units have error, and those were early on. 4 have validated and 3 are pending so for right now, it looks like they are working ok. Will need a few more work unit results before we can tell if there is a problem. My 2 cents

Zalster

Robert as I have already told you

TURN OFF HYPER THREADING YOU ONLY HAVE 2 FREAKING CORES ON THAT CHIP MATE

it's that freaking simple you can only do a total of 2 units on the CPU NOT 4 or 6
CPU on seti uses 0.04% of cpu to feed the GPU

THE FACT YOUR OVERHEATING IT AND RUNNING WAY TO MANY UNITS LOOK at my score for Einstein nearly 2 million mate

You have to turn off the HYPER THREADING Einstein units do take longer to do but not that long

The setting should be on the M/B TURN IT OFF

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Also my second cruncher has the gt 220 and can only do 1 Gpu unit at a time or it starts to take 12hr to do a seti units that should take 1hr

So your GPU can only handle 1 unit so max units you can do without overstressing it is 3

2 on the CPU 1 on the GPU

NO MORE THAN THAT OR YOUR MACHINE AN'T GOING TO LAST VERY LONG

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Robert as I have already told you

TURN OFF HYPER THREADING YOU ONLY HAVE 2 FREAKING CORES ON THAT CHIP MATE

it's that freaking simple you can only do a total of 2 units on the CPU NOT 4 or 6
CPU on seti uses 0.04% of cpu to feed the GPU

THE FACT YOUR OVERHEATING IT AND RUNNING WAY TO MANY UNITS LOOK at my score for Einstein nearly 2 million mate

You have to turn off the HYPER THREADING Einstein units do take longer to do but not that long

The setting should be on the M/B TURN IT OFF

I have no idea where you are getting them running 5 or 6 tasks on the CPU, or that their system is overheating. There is no reason for them to disable Hyper-Threading.

When running Astropulse on a GPU a "core" per AP task should be reserved. Which they can easily do by setting their processor usage to 75% of the processors. It doesn't matter if it is a real core or a virtual HT core. Running 3 MB on the CPU & one free for the 1 AP GPU task. Which is how I configured my i3 system. Even before I reserved a "core" the AP tasks never ran as long as the tasks on that system.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
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Hal I had a m/b with HYPER thread and I didn't know at the time when machine started up it looke like 2 cores on the task manager so I thought great till it started doing seti and was so dam slow.

So after a bit of investigation I found out it was only a Pentium chip 1 core but the m/b had HYPER THREAD and when I turn'd it off it speed up so I have never used HYPER THREAD for this reason as you said it's a Virtual core and it will slow things down

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Aso HAL it was a 775 socket which threw me off a bit and also why I thought great 2 cores must be a Duo but it wasn't

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Hal I had a m/b with HYPER thread and I didn't know at the time when machine started up it looke like 2 cores on the task manager so I thought great till it started doing seti and was so dam slow.

So after a bit of investigation I found out it was only a Pentium chip 1 core but the m/b had HYPER THREAD and when I turn'd it off it speed up so I have never used HYPER THREAD for this reason as you said it's a Virtual core and it will slow things down

I think you may have had another issue with your system slowing down. I've been using HT since it came out on the Pentium 4 without any issues. I recently just compared the efficiency of the current apps with HT on and off on one of my i7-860 systems. Using the Lunatics 64-bit SSSE3 app & HT enabled, while running 8 tasks, provided 31.2% greater output & consumed 11.1% more power. Compared to just running 4 tasks.
I have not run this same test of the 20 or so other machines I have that are running HT, but I would expect a similar result. Possibly with the older generation hardware showing less of a performance to power usage gain.
There are some types of processing that do not gain any benefit from HT. If there are BOINC projects that are like this I would limit the concurrent number of those tasks running at once.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
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Hal8000 the chip he is running I think is 1st gen I3 so HT mite not be too good.

Still not used to this AMD but it does have 8 cores and 8 threads but I only see 8 not 16 and I have not seen how to turn HT on the M/B

Gigabyte 970a-d3p m/b so I'm not shore if it has it as I havn't found it yet any help would be most grate full and then I can try it and see if I get much of a improvement

There is the heating prob he has maybe it's just getting to hot if you reackon HT doesn't do anything ...me not so shore but i'll take what you said on board and leave my judgement till I can try myself

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Hal8000 the chip he is running I think is 1st gen I3 so HT mite not be too good.

Still not used to this AMD but it does have 8 cores and 8 threads but I only see 8 not 16 and I have not seen how to turn HT on the M/B

Gigabyte 970a-d3p m/b so I'm not shore if it has it as I havn't found it yet any help would be most grate full and then I can try it and see if I get much of a improvement

There is the heating prob he has maybe it's just getting to hot if you reackon HT doesn't do anything ...me not so shore but i'll take what you said on board and leave my judgement till I can try myself

Their i3-2100 is a 2nd generation. I have a first generation i3-390M.

Hyper-Threading is an Intel technology, but not to worry. Your chip has 8 cores, but only 4 FPUs. With 1 FPU being shared between 2 cores. So it has a similar effect to having a 4 core processor with HT.

HT does increase heat but their temps are within normal limits. Also their HD6450 is running a bit cooler than my HD6370 is right now pumping out AP work.

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SETI@home classic workunits: 93,865 CPU time: 863,447 hours
Join the [url=http://tinyurl.com/8y46zvu]BP6/VP6 User Group[