Posts by Gustav_and_Padma

1) Message boards : Number crunching : 3/26/09-No new work thread (Message 878641)
Posted 23 Mar 2009 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
If you don't want to run AstroPulse tasks, disable them in your SETI@home preferences. That's better than aborting them.

You should set
Run only the selected applications
SETI@home Enhanced: yes
Astropulse: no
Astropulse v5: no
If no work for selected applications is available, accept work from other applications? no

Gruß,
Gundolf


Thanks, I hate to sound like a moron (Sometimes it can't be helped, LOL) We are fine running Astropusle on one of the three computers in our household, and I think we have managed to set the preferences for home, school & work to try to control them each differently. For Astropulse, it doesn't seem to matter much though, because SETI seems to be able to decide which computers are too slow for Astropulse all by itself.

However, lately we are not getting any AP WU's at all. I think we were OK before by limiting our preferences to not use GPU somewhere in the preferences, since our graphic card does not support the Astropulse version that requires NVIDIA graphics.

I do not know which options to set to allow the kind of Astropulse our machine can handle. I am guessing that we should say, "yes" for Astropulse V5 and "no" for Astropulse.

But, I don't know how SETI will respond depending on how we set the switch for SETI@home Enhanced.

It seems that allowing Astropulse to run is advantageous for our overall RAC, even though it dips lower while waiting for the WU's to validate.

Also, do we just leave the other option as, "no" to enable GPU usage?

Thanks, Padma


2) Message boards : Number crunching : Simple question: Vista and service install (Message 864653)
Posted 12 Feb 2009 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
I am not sure if this is the right forum for this question. But here goes: I tried installing the GridRepublic accountmanager, just for no good reason at all, frankly. After discussing it with my husband, after the fact (oops), we decided we might be wasting our computer resources to run it in addition to Boinc. But, when I went to the GridRepublic forum and FAQ, I could find no help in uninstalling the download (without losing work). I followed my hunch and did a Vista Home Premium system restore to the day prior to the download, then reinstalled Boinc 6.4.5.
Q: Was that enough to remove the GridRepublic account manager from the machine? Or do we need to do more. -Padma
3) Questions and Answers : Windows : Upgrade to 6.4.5 (Message 855610)
Posted 20 Jan 2009 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
OK thanx, works for us so far. We don't have NVIDIA graphics, and have never run the optimised Astropulse App, we were wondering what would happen by upgrading to Boinc 6.4.5. We ran a lot of stock AP work units with SETI stock ver 4.X and 5.0 in the past, getting credit for almost all of them. But when we first installed the 6.4.5 upgrade, it told us that Astropulse would not run on our computer. We reset the GPU usage to 'no' as you suggested and it downloaded an AP WU as soon as we reset the project to 'allow new tasks'. Then we noticed some comments on other threads that recommended against upgrading to 6.4.5 if you are not using NVIDIA graphics. This is not a problem report. But, we are wondering if we will still be able to validate Astropulse WU's now.
4) Message boards : Number crunching : Astropulse Errors-Optimized version 5 (Message 841578)
Posted 18 Dec 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
This may be too specific for this thread. But, just as a follow up, it looks like the original wingman's machine running optiized ver 4.35 <a href="http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/result.php?resultid=1051552517">
Task ID = 1051552517</a> ran in only just over half the CPU time as each of us running Standard AP Ver 5, both on almost identical machines, although the third wingman is running XP, not Vista like ours; his CPU time was shorter than ours too. The first wingman -did- get credit, which is a good thing. Yet his validation was delayed for some time after the 2nd and 3rd wingmen received credit. All three of our crunches finally validated and received the same credit. However, it is still comparing apples and oramges since the first wingman is running a 64 bit processor and we (the 2nd and 3rd wingmen completing the WU) have floating point calculations only about 2/3rds as fast as the first wingman (Thomas Heutinger and Friends). Still, the overall conclusion would appear to be that the optimized AP crunch was, in fact, a more efficient run.
5) Message boards : Number crunching : Astropulse Errors-Optimized version 5 (Message 840839)
Posted 17 Dec 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
The stderr part of a Task details page is separate from the actual result which was uploaded. The optimized 4.35 stderr is indeed quite different from stock 4.36, but the results are intended to be the same.


You are definitely not the only ones puzzled about what the project was and is doing. In the early days of SETI@home there was quite a lot of information and the project was adequately funded. Now the funding is barely enough to keep it running at all, and information is minimal. In my view those relationships basically define the situation. 
                                                               Joe


Thank You Josef

We will continue our support however small it may be. If others do so too, hopefully this research shall continue. And, someday in the future people will look back and be grateful for our eccentric behavior.
6) Message boards : Number crunching : Astropulse Errors-Optimized version 5 (Message 839995)
Posted 14 Dec 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
Where is the thread for non optimised AP issues? The one we had been using has a final post refering all AP issues here. But here there seems to be some problem with that. Maybe you guys would just rather not hear from us at all. Or maybe somebody should start another thread?

We are just rying to figure out if the apps we are running make sense to use. Like this last one,
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/result.php?resultid=1051552517
by our wingman who reported it using some form of AP ver 4.35, but his result doesn't look like the ones we ran with version 4.36 of Astropulse at all. (We are running Standard AP Ver 5, and that on only one machine - not optimised). So a third wingman has apparently been called in. Ok, that makes sense to casual participants like us.

It just seems odd that sometimes discrepancies require a third wingman and credit remains 'pending', while in other circumstances credit is granted as zero. And, As we've stated before, the results do not, in all cases, remain visible for 24 houss after granting credit. Thus, we are never really sure what happens to some of our efforts.

But, some comments we've received back about posts in which we have mentioned this make us sound like morons. And all we are trying to do is provide observations that might be helpful to whomever might understand/debug how the validation and reporting software really works.

It is understandable that, as complicated as the validation coding must certainly be, that some sequences of events might trigger inconsistent reporting protocols. People with marginal programming experience (like us) can understand how that could happen. In fact folks like us can probably understand it better than one might guess, lol.

We don't really care if there are inconsistencies in the reporting protocols. Everybody wants their brownie points, of course. But we think, for typical users to remain motivated to donate computing time to this research project, well informed responses to posts containing questions or comments are of greater benefit to the project.

For us we would love to hear something like, 'your point is something we are working on, but the current progtamming priority is to maintain accuracy in the science database' (translation: we are swamped grading final exams right now -don't bother us about your brownie points), :)

So which thread should a post like this go to?, =/null?
7) Message boards : Number crunching : Astropulse Errors-Optimized version 5 (Message 837891)
Posted 8 Dec 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
OK. thanx. Actually since the last time we checked, our total credit just jumped up to where we assumed it would go if granted crdit. So, even tho some umtold number of pending AP WU's are still ver 4,(not just ours but everyone elses) they are likely to validate too, it would seem. We could be wrong about this: What we are saying is that we don't think the credit was visible for 24 hours after it disappeared from pending status. And it seems like it took well over 12 hours before the credit was added to our total. We are just glad that the older version AP WU's are able to validate at all. Cheers!
8) Message boards : Number crunching : Astropulse Errors-Optimized version 5 (Message 837759)
Posted 7 Dec 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
What happens when a successfully completed WU waits over a month for a wingman to validate? Included in our pending credit total, we had an AP WU of about 750 credits pending last night. But this morning they were dropped from our pending credit total and the result is no longer visible. Our total credit didn't increase accordingly. Was the work lost?

This other one is a month old too, and we're wondering if results like these will eventually get considered, or if we are just wasting electricity.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/workunit.php?wuid=354147917
9) Message boards : Number crunching : AstroPulse errors - Reporting (Message 834019)
Posted 24 Nov 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
So is the number 30 some kind of threshhold for pulses and reapeating pulses? For those of us who don't understand the science, it would be interesting to know, hence motivating for us to dedicate our computers to crunching this data. The question really is, why don't the AP results show us in a few characters how many pulses and repeating pulses our computers found per WU, even though they might be twenty-something or less -- perhaps not 'exciting' per se, but maybe worth a mention of 'moderately interesting', 'mildly remarkable', or some other message decipherable with average human skills? -smiles- Gustav
10) Message boards : Number crunching : AstroPulse errors - Reporting (Message 832253)
Posted 20 Nov 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
OK, thanks for noticing that. We were getting fun sounding results like the first wingman on this WU before we started having problems on our Vista machine. But everything has been working OK now for months. Or so we think. How do we update our version? Do we need updating on both machines?
11) Message boards : Number crunching : AstroPulse errors - Reporting (Message 832215)
Posted 19 Nov 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
I imagine a similar answer would apply for this one:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/workunit.php?wuid=359221696

Right now it looks like we are waiting for a third client to report back. I'm sure you have answeed this question many times before. What I am wondering about, in addition to (1) Who will get how much credit (right now it is zero - not pending - for the first two of us who completed crunching the WU), is (2) Why is there a discrepancy in the first place? Thanks, Padma
12) Message boards : Number crunching : AstroPulse errors - Reporting (Message 819463)
Posted 16 Oct 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
Any idea to what happened to the WU associated with this task? It is pretty old but has no reference.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/result.php?resultid=966830989
13) Questions and Answers : Macintosh : Astropulse binaries for other platforms (Message 816002)
Posted 8 Oct 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
It seems a bit over our heads (no pun intended :) But we did download your application and Tiger OS knew how to un-tar it OK. But we did not install it, as we were worried we might trash our standard WU's in our queue. Then, for no apparent reason the Boinc application started shutting itself off. Maybe some kind of hiccup. It never did that before. Can't really tell if it is still running in the background, or what. I guess a reboot is in order at least.
14) Message boards : Number crunching : AstroPulse errors - Reporting (Message 815997)
Posted 8 Oct 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
Can we review all of our prior results? Probably should read all of the FAQ's before asking, but the links through our account page only go back so far. The reason we're asking is that the first couple of AP WU's we crunched had interesting looking results, with notes like 'number of pulses found' and 'number of repeating pulses found". We are back on track with AP WU's crunching OK and waiting for quorum results on a couple of them now. Credits aside, the results don't show anything interesting. How does SETI decide how to create WU's for AP? Even the standard SETI WU results tell you how many pulses were found. Wherever SETI was looking on our first couple of AP crunches seemed promising. Does SETI (standard or AP) zero in on areas where pulses have been found? Now that we are crunching OK without errors again, the latest AP results dont give anything that makes any sense to mere SETI members like ourselves.
15) Message boards : Number crunching : AstroPulse errors - Reporting (Message 813810)
Posted 1 Oct 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
Did not know that Astropulse would run on a Mac. We have Tiger not Leopard, i.e., we are running OS X 10.4 something - whatever the latest 10.4 is. Do you need 10.5 to run the Astropulse for Mac? Probably 8^O We got the latest Mac available - like three years ago, then wham they started selling the Intel's with 2 cpu's - even though apple didn't give OS X 10.5 for some time after. Aside from the digression here, can we run Astropulse on the apple G4/(or 5) with The Tiger OS?
16) Message boards : Number crunching : AstroPulse errors - Reporting (Message 810733)
Posted 21 Sep 2008 by Profile Gustav_and_Padma
Post:
We have successfully computed a few astropulse baches of data. But we have had a few client errors as well. The first errors we created when we tried to gracefully finish up some seti@home tasks before closing down the sytem to do a clean reimstall on our GenuineIntel Intel(R) Pentium(R) Dual CPU E2160 @ 1.80GHz [x86 Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 13] running Windows Vista Home Premium. We were not so graceful and scrapped a few tasks in the provess. Then we got things working right again and Seti@home eventually gave us a couple of other chances to run some astropulse tasks. They completed fine, but were waiting to report forever. And we lost the data when switching users. Two great big astropulse cruches - darn. We have more than one user on the computer and now we are pretty sure we should just do an 'update project' when the boinc servers are up before either "switching users" (vista style) or logging off a user.

1.) If we are careful to do this, will Seti give us a chance to do some more astropulse crunches?

It seems almost as if Seti punishes us by giving us low point value - high CPU time tasks if we force project updates though. Maybe it is just a coincidence that seems to happen. But with our wasted astropulse data, we are forcing project updates whenever we notice more than one unreported task, as that seems to be a sensible safety precaution.

2) Is there any rhyme or reason for getting low point value - high CPU ratio tasks?





 
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