[Todd Madson]

FYI:

My PC machines are now at Chicken Good v2.2B and the performance increase
is significant. This Pentium M laptop I have went from 230-240 RAC to 396 so far.
(update, 413 and increasing)

The Athlon 2400 and 2800 boxes went from low 200s to over 305 (update 352) in
the case of the 2800 and the 2400 was rebuilt but it's over 165 now (update 257!)
when before it would piddle around 115.

Chicken Good is......good!

[alexkan]

Sorry to keep you guys waiting! Yes, beta testing for Core2 processors is at a point where I'd say those apps are ready for release. However, I want to do a simultaneous release for PowerPC and x86, so I'm going to hold back until the PPC side of things is coded and tested. The reason for this primarily concerns the GPL--since I need to make source code to the binaries available, the logistics are easier for me if I can make a single codebase available, instead of splitting between a bunch of different versions.

Give me a couple days to get the PowerPC builds up and running. As you may already know, there are things that I did for v7.2 for x86 that weren't in v7.1 for PPC, so these alone should provide some performance gains. It remains to be seen whether the cache tuning I did for v8 will help PPC, so that means I'll need PPC testers once the code is almost ready. For that matter, I need testers with Core Duos, since I haven't assessed the performance impact on that architecture, either.

I realize my performance tuning has been targeted more towards the leaderboards lately, but hopefully what I've learned there will soon bear fruit for everyone else as well!

[ritzl]

If you need testers, I have a G4 Powerbook and an iMac C2Duo. Let me know if I can help. And what you need in terms of feedback.

[zombie67]

E.T. is over 9000 RAC!!

I have 2x G4 machines and 2x G5 machines attached to SETI. I am willing to test if you like.

[beadman]

Two items:
1) Alex: I have a G4 1.33MHz iBook, a G4 1.67 MHz Powerbooki, and (sometimes) a G5 PowerMac 7,2 (duo) at work. Would be happy to test for you.

2) Just noticed that ET and Bad to the Bone have both had a huge number of Client Errors in the last 24 hours - hope it's just SETI messing up and not the new enhanced client.

beadman

[Bad to the bone]

Alex, you can count on my farm for the next round of testing, of-course! A variety of PPC boxes and a few Core Duos (Minis, MacBooks and a MacBookPro) are available to run the pre-release worker.

The D/L errors affect everybody, it seems. Some WU's have maxed out the error count within a few minutes. Nothing to worry at this point, I'd say.

BTW: My two workhorses have finally passed the 6k RAC today. With the public release of V8 we should see a few more MacPros in the top ten very soon.

[arkayn]

I would be happy to do some testing as well.

[halimedia]

Congratulations to E.T, Bad to the Bone and of course to alexkan for the new high scores. Staggering improvement over PPC, I must say!

I suppose an 8-core 3 GHz Mac Pro would easily break the 10'000 RAC mark. Interesting times!

[Odysseus]

Originally Posted by arkayn 

I am running v5.8.15 on all 3 of my machines and have not had any problems with optimized workers.

You didn’t have to change any permissions?

I just tried the update, and I did have a problem—but it turned out to be easy to solve. I’d set S@h not to get any work and it had reported on its own when the last of its tasks finished, so all that was in the project folder was the v5.13 app and its ‘peripheral’ documents. I downloaded the seti_enhanced-i386-v7.2-core2-nographics stuff, stopped BOINC (verifying with Activity Manager), copied the files over, and restarted. A dialog came up:

BOINC ownership or permissions are not set properly; please reinstall BOINC.
(Error code -1202)

and BOINC quit when it was dismissed.

So I made a note of the permissions on the stock files, and changed the new ones accordingly. When the files were downloaded they had Owner (admin’s username), read & write; Group (admin’s username), read only; Others read only. The new settings were Owner boinc_master (still R&W); Group boinc_project, R&W (I had to change this one first, as it would grey out when the owner was changed). For the app_info.xml file I also set Others to R&W, in the hope of making it easier to tinker with if necessary. BOINC then launched without complaint, and when I allowed new work for S@h it downloaded some (and deleted the stock app &c.). It’s still running the Einstein@home tasks it was on when I interrupted it, so I can’t yet be sure everything’s tickety-boo, but it seems fine so far.

Sorry for going on so long, but the details might help another *nix newbie who gets the –1202 error.

P.S. @Alex: I would be willing to do some testing. I have available a handful of G4s (mostly 400-MHz “charcoal” models) running “Panther” and a dual-core 2.3-GHz G5 running “Tiger”. Unfortunately my partner’s iMac, featured in the above story, isn’t—for now, at least—one of her conditions for my installing BOINC on her system was “no beta testing”.

[arkayn]

What did you use to expand the files?

Stuffit, or Bom Archive helper?

[zombie67]

I just installed it on a fresh system (C2D), and I encountered the same problem. I used the default application to expand it. It happens so fast, I can't tell what application is used. For folks having this problem, here is something you can copy/paste in a terminal.

(quit BOINC)
cd /Library/Application\ Support/BOINC\ Data/projects/setiathome.berkeley.edu
sudo chown boinc_master:boinc_project *
(restart BOINC)

[zombie67]

I keep getting this error with a Xeon Mac Pro, using the C2D nographics application:

MacOS Error -5000 occured in /Users/alexkan/seti/boinc/mac_build/../api/mac_icon.C line 107

Here is an example:

Result

The WU seems to validate okay, so is this really a problem?

[Odysseus]

Originally Posted by arkayn 

What did you use to expand the files?
Stuffit, or Bom Archive helper?

I’m pretty sure it was the default BOMArchiveHelper.app, automatically triggered by Safari; other .zip files on the system show the ‘zipper’ icon rather than Stuffit’s ‘parcel’.

[Odysseus]

Originally Posted by zombie67 

MacOS Error -5000 occured in /Users/alexkan/seti/boinc/mac_build/../api/mac_icon.C line 107

This is a known issue, and can occur with the stock app as well (except, of course, that the path displayed is from someone else’s HD). Apparently it’s caused by BOINC’s lacking the necessary access to change the app’s icon from the generic ‘terminal screen‘ to the S@h ‘green dish’. Otherwise it seems quite harmless, and should have no effect on crunching or the validity thereof.

[Todd Madson]

Alex:
I have one G5 2.5 dual, one G4 1.25 ghz iMac and one 400 mhz PowermacG4.

I'll be glad to test.

[arkayn]

If everything goes as planned I should have a 2.0 C2D iMac starting up for me on Wednesday.

[Gecko_r7]

Originally Posted by arkayn 

If everything goes as planned I should have a 2.0 C2D iMac starting up for me on Wednesday.

You'll be pleasantly surprised at it's performance.
Mine just hit 2531 RAC w/ pre-release v8, still going up.

Not too long ago, this was Quad domain.

[arkayn]

Looks like it will be here on Thursday instead of Wednesday now.

Oh well, that is my day off and I can be here when it arrives.

[ritzl]

Agreed, pretty amazing the performance. I'm trying to bring back my old 350MHz G3 just to supplement. But also to test xGrid structures.

Have fun with it Arkayn.

[arkayn]

I will just have to do some moving around when it arrives, my eMac will become the music server (it will still crunch ) and the old iMac is going back to Apple to be recycled.