.........Computer is fine Andy, Software or install of that package, as this appeared during off hours, idle. Notebook P25-509 running virtually 24/7 for two years last month. No known BIOS updates no problems on other software in use.

If the fault of write address is correct at "0x00000010" that is interrupt table of the X86 chip design. Program should never access this area by Intel original design spec. from memory of design in the mid-70's.

You may be right, but from what I have personally found and what has been written in all the posts here, computers that have this problem and similar have in 99% of cases been tracked to wrongly configuration or drivers behaving badly.

The usual suspect in many cases is ATI graphics drivers and the associated Catalyst control centre. Sometimes updating the driver has worked and on my youngest sons machine removal of catalyst, which he says is total waste of space anyway, cured the problem.

Now I don't know if this applies to your computer, but it is a starting point.

Appreciate the response Andy: Video-NVIDIA, GeForce FX Go5200 has no known issues to me but will do some checking.

Hardware runs AutoCad, Development software and anything I have thrown at it to date. XP Home SP2 + latest updates and is current. Anti-Virus; Normans, CA Pest Patrol and Microsoft AntiSpyware Version: 1.0.701. Only today did this error appear. Will check updates.

---

...If there is one thing in a message remotely critical of BOINC, some butt heads over here give the message a negative rating. Really nice and friendly over here.
**Added after original submission** I've already got a -1 rating. Just goes to show....

Yup, real tolerant, too. I've noticed that the people that scream the loudest for tolerance throw it out the window a whole lot faster when someone might even appear to even think something counter to their view. So, go ahead, give me a minus, hell, give 20 or 30. The forum I hang out on doesn't have stupid little plus or minus thingies, if someone there disagrees with you they'll just come right out and say it and get it over with so both can just go on with life. If that sounds like a place you'd rather be, here's the link:

http://p101.ezboard.com/bsetiathomeclassic

BTW, we don't only talk about Classic, that's just a name. After all, "Whats in a name? A rose by any other name still smells as sweet".

---

Some random clarifications:

I. The faulty exponential backoff is a well known problem and is being worked on, especially in light of last week's issues.

II. Clarification about funding: There is some money for SETI@home hardware/data recording, mostly because this technology can be used (and is used) for various non-SETI projects. But there is no money for SETI@home Classic data analysis or day-to-day operations.

III. Regarding our "poor planning," some days around here are like working on the bridge of the Enterprise during the last ten minutes of any given episode where the ship is under attack or about to self destruct and there's the stock tension music and everything. It's not exactly fun. There is, on average, about 1.5 people in the lab at any given time. If something breaks, you don't think, "Hmm. Let me load up Xfig and draw a diagram then call for a 2 o'clock meeting where we can discuss this matter." It's more like: "Hmm. Every second we're pissing off 10 people. What's the quickest way I can fix this damn thing so I can get back to writing my grant proposal."

IV. We wrote about the outages less and less in the old SETI@home Classic tech news as time wore on. Same thing every week. Online cience database crashed. Server down for 12-24 hours. Everything's back up now. Should have wrote a script that put such a message up on the front page every five days or so. I don't know if anybody's noticed but the Classic servers have already crashed three times already this month. Had to kick 'em back to life every time. In fact, I think they're dropping connections right now...

- 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

In fact, I think they're dropping connections right now...
- Matt

Just to reassure you that I never saw S@H Classic down! I think that downtime is all part of the global IT conundrum. Live with it! There's not much else you can do!

---

If the fault of write address is correct at "0x00000010" that is interrupt table of the X86 chip design. Program should never access this area by Intel original design spec. from memory of design in the mid-70's.

Actually on NT Based platforms, the first 64k(?) of a processes address space is nulled out and both read and write access is denied.

Which OS are you using?

---

----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. Berkeley
My Blog

Props to Matt.

I don't know why people think technology (especially computers)is perfect right out of the box. Guess they never had to return anything.

I'm just glad that some of the Seti tech payatention to these boards so the "Dee dee dee" can get some explination to help them untangle their panties!!

---

Man, oh man. Am I ever tired of reading about this bitching. It started as an interesting topic then digressed. Let me re-group for myself:

As I understand it, there could be some resources dedicated to making this (s@h) project run smoothly.

1. Manpower, both kinds: paid and free.
2. Money, both kinds: free of strings and looking like a ball of twine.

..snip..

Addressing the second item, Money, takes only a bit of thought. If each member were asked to donate, I'm sure a sizeable number of the required donations would be met through the group. Maybe, an active campaign might help in keeping the hardware and software up-to-date? There's already links setup to handle our donations (both monetary and equipment), it sounds like getting organized to create a campaign to begin making these requests would be a great use of resources. I'm not trying to state that this is easy. It is "simple", but that doesn't mean it is "easy". We don't need to reinvent the wheel here, just a bit of a push to get the wheel rolling. And that leads me into the paying/funding aspect of the project.

..snip..


Thanks,
Tracy

Here you can donate

---

Matt, I took myself the liberty to spawn your thread in the Cafe, so there's some comments to you also there.

And a comment to the assertion made earlier in this thread, that classic stats can't be shown anywhere, it's not true! Sigs showing Classic stats can be made here among other places!

Else, thanks to you all, some of us actually never doubted you all, that you again would make this ship sail!

.oO(Maybe time to make a new money donation with the expressed command that you use the money for beers and a night out to celebrate your good work! :-D Just as a pat on your shoulders!!!)


EDIT: And, Matt, I hope you had a nice weekend in Los Angeles, and that you, Rom, had a nice trip to Australia! :-) Good to see you both back though! ;-)

---

"I'm trying to maintain a shred of dignity in this world." - Me

mmciastro & ML1,

Thanks for your kind welcome.

The reason I never went to the seti home page over the last two years was because I expected anything I needed to know about (ET found, new client, alteration in DC functioning, etc.) would be emailed to me as I had allowed contacting me via email.

With SetiDriver, I chose to 100 WUs in stock in case of outage. SetiSpy was added to my computer's startup menu and ran 100% of the time. Because of these two programs, any question as to my team progress or WUs crunched was immediately accessable. As such I never felt the need to check the home page and knew the project was functioning.

That's prologue now & BOINC does seem to be doing its job nicely and the temporary hiccup seti@home was having is over.

I will... look at the home page... more frequently from now on.

:)

I do have to admit that I liked the simplicity of the old system but the new one is obviously working and offers many nice options.

Kudos to Matt et al,

Gary

---

mmciastro & ML1,

Thanks for your kind welcome.

welcome to a fellow ham operator.

Terry
k4vh

mmciastro & ML1,

Thanks for your kind welcome.

welcome to a fellow ham operator.

Terry
k4vh

There are a few of us out there.

73's
N9ICD

---

My movie https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/502242

mmciastro & ML1,

Thanks for your kind welcome.

welcome to a fellow ham operator.

Terry
k4vh

There are a few of us out there.

73's
N9ICD

Yes there is. :-)

Jeremy KB7RZF

---

I personally have over 100,000 hours in computer time being donated under the seti classic project and after reading this set of “Here are some reasons off the top of my head that SETI@home Classic is shutting down” I feel a response is necessary to some of your points of perpetual misinformation, this all too typical of the computing environment.


SNIP


I hope the existing problems can be resolved in a reasonable time frame, for if the storage requirements become too great, I will dump the completed results to date and project in general.

Dennis

Perhaps, if some people had migrated earlier as requested for months on the Classic site, instead of racking up cheap Credits, Boinc-Seti would have been able to absorb influx of people. Instead the daily increase in users went from 600 to 4000. Tell me of any business that can handle that kind of growth overnight.
I for one do not consider your criticism valid and definitely not welcomed from a Johnny come lately.

From your numbers and your registration date, one has to guess you have a small farm. And YOU don't think you're partly responsible for the current woes.

I'm sorry if that offend you, but I find your post offensive

"I for one do not consider your criticism valid and definitely not welcomed from a Johnny come lately." --> Hardly a Johnny come lately as stated. That is the date of change over to the latest version on this notebook machine. If I can remember correctly, my classic start date was May 1994.

You did not offend me and I am terribly sorry you cannot handle reality!
Simple fact is as stated. Further during the overnight period, the following window was on the screen this very morning with a red circle with the white X, and stated:

Displayed window header:"setiathome_4.18_windows_intelx86.exe - Application error"


The instruction at "0x7c918fea" referenced memory at "0x00000010". The memory could not be "written".

Click on OK to terminate the program
Click on CANCEL to debug the program

GO FIGURE? Just suspended the seti! At least until the software is more stable. Has nothing to do with waiting! Just reality.

Go suspend Windows (I did so). I am happy crunching with MacOSX now with REAL 64bit power in hardware AND OS !

---

If the fault of write address is correct at "0x00000010" that is interrupt table of the X86 chip design. Program should never access this area by Intel original design spec. from memory of design in the mid-70's.

Actually on NT Based platforms, the first 64k(?) of a processes address space is nulled out and both read and write access is denied.

Which OS are you using?

OS Name Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Version 5.1.2600 Service Pack 2 Build 2600
OS Manufacturer Microsoft Corporation
System Name PORTABLE_2
System Manufacturer TOSHIBA
System Model Satellite P25
System Type X86-based PC
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 2 Stepping 9 GenuineIntel ~2793 Mhz
Processor x86 Family 15 Model 2 Stepping 9 GenuineIntel ~2793 Mhz
BIOS Version/Date TOSHIBA V1.80, 3/9/2004
SMBIOS Version 2.31
Windows Directory C:\\WINDOWS
System Directory C:\\WINDOWS\\system32
Boot Device \\Device\\HarddiskVolume1
Locale United States
Hardware Abstraction Layer Version = "5.1.2600.2180 (xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)"
User Name PORTABLE_2\\xxxxxxx
Time Zone Eastern Standard Time
Total Physical Memory 512.00 MB
Available Physical Memory 105.03 MB
Total Virtual Memory 2.00 GB
Available Virtual Memory 1.96 GB
Page File Space 1.22 GB
Page File C:\\pagefile.sys

---

Actually, Boinc is a part of the problem! The communication methodology that Boinc uses is definitely contributing to the bandwidth issues.

I looked into the libcurl that BOINC uses to manage its Internet communications between the client and servers. And a lot of Ethereal traces. It is quite efficient and there is not a bandwidth problem with the physical communications link. The "bandwidth" problem is inside the servers (as we now know from the solution found to this recent outage.) I found the Ethernet side of BOINC's communications methodology to be quite suitable for large scale projects like this. Having a huge number of clients pounding on it should not really be a problem at all, as it can and does make an efficient connections with each of them, and just lets most of them wait and timeout (instead of coming right back at it with another request). Dropping excess connections is one of the subtle features of the communications methodology used by libcurl and BOINC. It allows them to be dropped and after timing out or backed off, retried later. This seems to have been working very well during the outage, except for some minor back-off issues. The fact that next to nothing was getting transfered had nothing to do with the communications methodology used by the BOINC system and the BOINC Manager client software.

When the bottleneck was "fixed" in the server, uploads proceeded at a rate and efficiency never before seen in the BOINC/Seti project, in spite of the very large number of systems trying to upload. Sure, there was a big bump in network traffic, but the data rate no where near stressed the 100Mbps Ethernet link into the lab. (15Mbps in, 40Mbps out and that includes the background Seti Classic traffic that was going on {2M/12M})

So, "The communications methodology that BOINC uses is definitely" NOT "contributing to the bandwidth issues."

Can't say the same for for the Seti server(s) and their programming.

Let's slow down a minute. There are some of us out here that are somewhat crusty systems people. There is obviously an architecture problem that does not seem to be addressed. If anything, the combination of Seti and Boinc is clearly showing some of Boinc's limitations. It's a volume thing that the other projects have yet to experience.

No.
It does not show any limitations of BOINC.
And yes, It's a volume thing that the other projects have yet to experience.

It does however, show up very clearly the problems with some of the architecture implementation decisions made by Seti in how their servers are programmed, and that not only have they not been addressed, but prior suggestions on how to fix them have been rejected.

Trying to run a server with extensive CGI scripts is fine for a lightly access web server, even one running as a file download/upload server. CGI script overhead and performance is not suitable for trying to manage processes in a high transaction rate data base server.

Note that when the upload CGI script was converted to FastCGI, the upload server went from being a 35 per second upload transaction processor that failed under the stress of a heavy load, to one that adeptly handled 90 or more transactions per second. BOINC in this process did its part well.

With some additional performance tweaking of the code and CGI scripts converted to FastCGI, there is no reason that the server could not do 100 transactions per second or more until it becomes limited by the file system it is accessing.

The fact that the server failed so badly under load does suggest that there is still some sort of logic problem with its handling of transactions and connections, but as this mornings live test worked so well, it may never show up again. At least during uploads. No bets on what happens when everything else is running on kryten.

The only real performance issue here is, will Seti address their architecture implementation problems? Maybe with Computer Engineers as programmers who understand the limitations of hardware, instead of Computer Science majors.

At this point one on the outside could start asking questions like:

Are slow CGI scripts being used to access the data base?
Are slow CGI scripts being used to handle communications between processes?
Are slow CGI scripts being used to handle communications between servers?
Has a performance analysis been done of the parts of the existing software?
Do you know where each of the bottle necks are and a what load they can handle?
Do you know what happens when each of the bottle necks are stressed to limits?

While using things like FastCGI require extra work for any simple maintenance, it sure does work a lot faster and better in high transaction rate servers.

CGI scripts are fine for slow background processes, but not for any of the front end handling of uploads, downloads, data base access and communications with clients.

I keep seeing in these forum threads various valid complaints. Here are some reasons off the top of my head that SETI@home Classic is shutting down, and other facts of life that may very well address your particular concern:

1. SETI@home Classic has no funding at this point. Hasn't had it for years now. Costs about $500,000/year at a minimum to run the thing. SETI@home as we know it now is coasting on fumes until (hopefully) more funding somehow appears. BOINC has funding. Therefore, putting SETI@home on BOINC has given it at least some life in the past two years, and is really the only chance for any kind of future.

2. SETI@home Classic was supposed to be a 3 or 4 year project to begin with. So it's well past it's proposed lifespan with no money added to keep it going.

3. The science in SETI@home Classic is basically over. We collected more than enough data with the current instrument. We have a new data recorder close to finished and a new BOINC client will be in the works to analyze this data. To keep Classic going would mean compiling a new Classic client to analyze this data. It's been a loooong time since a new Classic client has been built. The code is stale, and the build machines are ancient and painful to use (if they even exist anymore).

4. The SETI@home Classic backend is a tangled mess. There have been many problems over the years, most of which were invisible to the participants. None of these problems were fatal to the project or its science, but have resulted in an obnoxious web of ridiculous dependencies, confusing configurations, and unweildy databases. I am practically drooling dreaming of day when we get to turn all that stuff off and be done with it already. The BOINC backend is sooooo much easier to deal with.

5. The current crises are just par for the course in the history of our SETI project and public resource computing. Things break, deep breaths are taken, and they get fixed eventually. This isn't good for making our participants happy of course, but we do our best with what we got and so far our user base has stuck with us through the painful periods (thank you!!!).

6. BOINC was written so you can connect to other projects when there are server issues with a specific project. This is a good thing. SETI@home Classic has no such ability.

7. BOINC credit, while not perfect (though we're working on that), is much more fair in that it represents actual work done, and is valid between projects which do all kinds of different work. There is no way to translate Classic credit to BOINC credit, and so this will never happen. Classic credits will be noted in a separate field in a user profile (and will be eventually sync'ed up again after Classic shuts down).

8. Though I don't have any accurate numbers to back this up, I personally feel that so far SETI@home/BOINC has had more uptime on average than Classic. We had science database crashes every week at times back in the day, several whole weeks when we were down for database recovery or because somebody stole a cable, network bandwidth issues that brought us down for months. And these were just the public-facing downtime events (among but a few).

9. There is no tech support on staff. I end up with dozens of e-mails a day from people who figured out how to reach me. If I dealt with all these, that would occupy about 15-20% of my time. I don't have this time and neither does anybody else around here. Many of these e-mails go unaswered. Sad but true, and I personally find this painful but part of the big picture.

10. Yes, we can do better in the PR department. See #9 above. Don't have the staff or the money to add the staff. And it's not so easy to add news items to the page. I can't be bothered to go into detail why. I leave this as an exercise for the reader to figure out why.

11. The staff is small. Me and Jeff are continually up to our necks dealing with everything. We've both been here working on SETI long before SETI@home came around, so we both are well versed in every aspect of the "big picture" around here. Bob, the main database guy, actually only works half time. Court is busy dealing with various long term network/systems projects that Jeff and I can't handle since we're diagnosing, debugging, programming, or maybe actually getting science done. David and Rom (and other various programmers) strictly work on BOINC code. Eric works overtime on other non-SETI projects when he's not building the next SETI@home client. Dan, the project director, is spending a lot of time building spectrometers for other projects because that's where the money is. Outside of current academics (Kevin and Josh) working on other applications of SETI data, and students helping Dan build hardware that's it here at the lab. No administrative staff, no tech writers. When it comes time to fill out a new grant proposal, we all drop everything and work on that, for example.

12. If anybody complains elsewhere about any of the above, please be kind and point them to this post. People have the right to be upset with us since they are kindly donating their resources to us. However, there is a lot of misinformation or misunderstanding about this project and I hope I cleared some of it up.

Now I'm off to bed. Going to LA tomorrow. Be back Sunday night.

- Matt

---

To simply freeze everyone's credit to the classic SAH project is completely unfair to those who have been diligently processing WU's. Why would it not be possible to take the average credit received after processing say 100 or 1000 BOINC SAH WU's and simply multiply that by the classic number of WU's completed. I started out like everyone else in Classic crunching a single work unit. Over 6 years, I have added computers to my home network solely for the purpose of crunching numbers for SAH and to try to get as high in the ratings as possible. Now, all that work goes by the wayside and I have to restart from zero? If that's going to be the case, I'll be shutting down all computers as of 12/15. If that's all you care about the people who have made this project what it is, I'm finished with any distributed processing project ever offered by Berkeley.

Goodbye SAH Classic, and goodbye to BOINC!

---

To simply freeze everyone's credit to the classic SAH project is completely unfair to those who have been diligently processing WU's. Why would it not be possible to take the average credit received after processing say 100 or 1000 BOINC SAH WU's and simply multiply that by the classic number of WU's completed. I started out like everyone else in Classic crunching a single work unit. Over 6 years, I have added computers to my home network solely for the purpose of crunching numbers for SAH and to try to get as high in the ratings as possible. Now, all that work goes by the wayside and I have to restart from zero? If that's going to be the case, I'll be shutting down all computers as of 12/15. If that's all you care about the people who have made this project what it is, I'm finished with any distributed processing project ever offered by Berkeley.

Goodbye SAH Classic, and goodbye to BOINC!

Anybody who wishes to know what contribution you made to Classic can be easily read by clicking on your name, alongside the post, which also shows your start date. This was way before BOINC started so everybody knows your a long time cruncher. I read;
SETI@home member since 7 Aug 1999
Country United States
Total credit 709.09
Recent average credit 7.39
SETI@home classic workunits
as of 15 March 2005 56,047
SETI@home classic CPU time
as of 15 March 2005 278,277 hours
Team May the Schwartz be with you

The total credits will be updated shortly after classic closes.

---

To simply freeze everyone's credit to the classic SAH project is completely unfair to those who have been diligently processing WU's. Why would it not be possible to take the average credit received after processing say 100 or 1000 BOINC SAH WU's and simply multiply that by the classic number of WU's completed. I started out like everyone else in Classic crunching a single work unit. Over 6 years, I have added computers to my home network solely for the purpose of crunching numbers for SAH and to try to get as high in the ratings as possible. Now, all that work goes by the wayside and I have to restart from zero? If that's going to be the case, I'll be shutting down all computers as of 12/15. If that's all you care about the people who have made this project what it is, I'm finished with any distributed processing project ever offered by Berkeley.

Goodbye SAH Classic, and goodbye to BOINC!

There is NO fair way to convert them. I crunched since Jul 6 1999, and felt similar a year and a half ago when I came over here. There are many reasons why it can't be converted. The biggest for me is that Seti under boinc was engineered to help prevent the cheating that occured in classic. I know I wouldn't want a cheater to get the conversion. Also, earlier classic work was completed quicker than the 3.08 app, and how would you adjust for that? Then there's the ever increasing speed of processors. Seti under boinc makes calculations based upon benchmarks and actual CPU time used. THen there is the WUs that contained too much noise, should you get full credit for those? In Boinc the application aborts the noisey wus so you don't waste time crunching them to completion and you get partial credit for them. In Boinc you get credit ONLY for valid work, junk files just don't cut it here.

If you must leave then, thanks for your participation to this point.

tony

---

Oh yeah, Look at the bottom line of my Signature for my up to date Classic stats. You're credits aren't lost