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You are here: MacNN Forums > Community > Team MacNN > New Altivec-enhanced Seti worker in need of testing

New Altivec-enhanced Seti worker in need of testing (Page 20)
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Todd Madson
Mac Elite
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Location: Minneapolis, MN USA
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May 10, 2006, 10:11 AM
 
Brianwc: Someone figured out a way to get the graphics to display and I can't remember
who on earth figured it out - can anyone remember if it was here or at the actual seti site?

It involved modifying the package I believe to make it slot-in.
     
rick
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Join Date: Sep 2005
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May 14, 2006, 08:19 AM
 
Originally Posted by brianwc
This thread is getting too long to review! Can someone tell me if there is a SETI client optimized for the G4 7410 that still displays graphics? I know it's corny, but I'd like to see the graphics. If not, I'll take a link to the latest optimized client without graphics. Thanks.
Sorry, none of our optimised clients have graphics at the moment. The plan is to add this back in eventually but it's got a low priority at the moment because optimisation and correctness is our main goal.

When / if this gets back in is pure speculation at this point. I've only recently got back into working on the client and Alex is busy with some other stuff at the moment.

I'll look into it though and see how feasible it is to get it into future releases.

Originally Posted by Todd Madson
Brianwc: Someone figured out a way to get the graphics to display and I can't remember
who on earth figured it out - can anyone remember if it was here or at the actual seti site?
With our optimised clients? I'm pretty sure it's not possible because I specifically removed the graphics bits (mainly because it would be an extra thing to debug).
     
Karl Schimanek
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May 16, 2006, 02:12 PM
 
One little question: Is the source code of the A53 also available?

Thanks
Karl
     
halimedia
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Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Switzerland
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May 17, 2006, 07:19 AM
 
Hi All!

I have recently quite often observed the 'no work from project' message in the log after my Quad requested more work from SETI, even though the project had plenty of work to dish out. Also, I've noticed that when I can get work, I can only get 20 WUs at a time. While I'm not certain, it appears to me that I was able to get more in the past. On average, it appears that I can only get 20 new WUs per hour from SETI. With my Quad crunching 16 WUs per hour, this allows me to build up my cache by 4 WUs or 15 minutes per hour. After sustained outages like yesterday's, it takes a long time to build a cache again.

Is anyone else seeing this as well? Can I in any way influence, how many WUs SETI allows me to dl in one scheduler request?

NB: I'm alternately using BOINC Menubar Superbench 5.2.13 or CLI Superbench 5.2.13 w/ a-5.3.

TIA for any replies!

Cheers,

Ron
( Last edited by halimedia; May 17, 2006 at 07:48 AM. )
     
brysonda
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May 17, 2006, 08:23 AM
 
I think the slow cache build was a result of the setiathome_enhanced transition. Only a couple of the splitters were generating setiathome work units. Starting yesterday they are generating no more work units, so we'll be seeing a lot more of that message. I'm going to let my queues run completely down before I transition, though.
     
Knightrider
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May 17, 2006, 09:32 AM
 
Originally Posted by halimedia
Hi All!

I have recently quite often observed the 'no work from project' message in the log after my Quad requested more work from SETI, ...........
.
........NB: I'm alternately using BOINC Menubar Superbench 5.2.13 or CLI Superbench 5.2.13 w/ a-5.3.
As you probably know, the way to increase the number of wu's in your cache is to adjust the setting in your prefs for "Connect to network about every ??? (determines size of work cache; maximum 10 days)". In this case however, the old seti 4.18 wu's will be discontinued by the end of May, sooner perhaps. The new seti wu's are 5.13 and called seti_enhanced.

see my first post in this thread HERE for more information.

Edit: Two reasons

May 16, 2006
A cascade of problems today caused inability to return results and later, the inability to download new work. One of the data servers lost the ability to see the upload directory. After reboot, it temporarily lost the ability to see the entire network.
May 16, 2006
All of our splitters have been altered to create workunits for SETI@home enhanced. Thanks for your patience during this transition.

K.
( Last edited by Knightrider; May 17, 2006 at 03:35 PM. )
     
halimedia
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May 18, 2006, 05:13 AM
 
Originally Posted by Knightrider
As you probably know, the way to increase the number of wu's in your cache is to adjust the setting in your prefs for "Connect to network about every ??? (determines size of work cache; maximum 10 days)".
Thanks for the info - I already knew that, as you guessed. My question was why the cache was building so slowly, and how I can enhance that, if at all. Your assessment was correct - it's simply because there are no more non-enhanced WUs served by SETI. I started the transition to enhanced - I fear for my RAC!

Bob Palmer's Quad still holds the top spot, but he's run out of work, too, and the Windoze-world will be claiming the crown shortly, I'm afraid. We're in dire need of an optimized enhanced client!

Cheers,

Ron
( Last edited by halimedia; May 18, 2006 at 05:50 AM. )
     
halimedia
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May 18, 2006, 09:32 AM
 
Update: my quad takes 6 to 9 times as long to process an enhanced WU than it did before w/ a-5.3. It claims about 1.1 to 2.5 times the credit (nothing granted yet). Ouch!

I guess this is my last post in this thread. Thanks again to Alex and Rick for their great work! It was a fun ride!
     
brysonda
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May 18, 2006, 09:54 AM
 
Originally Posted by halimedia
Update: my quad takes 6 to 9 times as long to process an enhanced WU than it did before w/ a-5.3. It claims about 1.1 to 2.5 times the credit (nothing granted yet). Ouch!
On the plus side, after a little browsing of the top computers, it looks like PCs may be in for a similar hit in RAC. A Pentium D 3.2 GHz took about 11000s for an average enhanced work unit worth 65 cobblestones. Compare that with 10600s for the first few 65 cobblestone work units performed by my Quad, and we may still have a chance.

With optimization we can perhaps go even higher, though it looks like credit will still be much lower than before.
     
Todd Madson
Mac Elite
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Location: Minneapolis, MN USA
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May 18, 2006, 10:56 AM
 
I was out of town for four days in california and when I returned I found my
router hung - my machine literally had hundreds of blocks to submit on Monday.

It grabbed a TON of work to do, I stopped counting at 200. The little Pentium
M laptop I use has 180 blocks to process as of now 17May 9:55 cst.

So I wonder if I will be the last G5 to have a ton of work to submit? But things
are definetely dropping from their heights of before.

And yes, I look forward to an optimized enhanced too. Here's hoping Alex and
Rick get their ducks in a row and we can do as well as we did before.
     
liebsmaschine
Registered User
Join Date: Jul 2006
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May 18, 2006, 04:17 PM
 
Originally Posted by Todd Madson
And yes, I look forward to an optimized enhanced too. Here's hoping Alex and
Rick get their ducks in a row and we can do as well as we did before.
Hey, unless we want to pay them, we have to take what we can get from them! :-) I'm sure they have other things to do in life...

But it would be nice to at least have an update or estimate on when things will be looking better. Alex and Rick, you haven't been very active on the board here in the last week since Enhanced came out...can you give us at least a rough idea of when you'll have the first usable enhanced alpha out?

Boog has come out with his own optimized client, but the jury's still out on how well it works and if all units get validated.

Edit: Boog's client is actually here--the above link is a thread about his client but doesn't contain the client itself.
     
rick
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May 20, 2006, 10:16 AM
 
Originally Posted by Karl Schimanek
One little question: Is the source code of the A53 also available?
I don't think so. The alpha 5.2 code is up though.

Originally Posted by jackal
Hey, unless we want to pay them, we have to take what we can get from them! :-) I'm sure they have other things to do in life...
Ha, indeed. "Busy" would be a massive understatement. I might get a few days free at the start of June and I should have cleared up a few of the other things that I'm working on by then.

Originally Posted by jackal
But it would be nice to at least have an update or estimate on when things will be looking better. Alex and Rick, you haven't been very active on the board here in the last week since Enhanced came out...can you give us at least a rough idea of when you'll have the first usable enhanced alpha out?
Man, I really have no idea. I'm talking to Alex about getting the Enhanced source code up and running (or, at least I will be as soon as I mail him back). In theory, the changes shouldn't be that difficult, it's finding the time to do it. Probably in the range of a few months. I really can't say.

However, before we release a new client there are a few things that we'd like to sort out that will make the client more accurate and easier to use (e.g. update website (ack, still not updated since December!), write FAQ, make installation easier).

I've pretty much finished coding up a nice FFTW wisdom generator with GUI front end so this will be easier for all concerned. Should release it in the next week or so.

Originally Posted by jackal
Boog has come out with his own optimized client, but the jury's still out on how well it works and if all units get validated.
That's cool to see. It'll have to do for the forseeable future. Cheers boog.



For those of you with shiny Intel Macs, could you please take a look at this post. Danke schön!
     
alexkan  (op)
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Location: Cupertino, CA
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May 21, 2006, 02:24 AM
 
Alright, I've made you guys wait long enough, so here's my situation.

First of all, I've been pretty busy myself. The UC Berkeley College of Engineering commencement was today, but my work's not done yet--I still have research- and student group-related tasks to complete before I leave Berkeley. To be honest, I hadn't actually tried setting up my machine to build SETI Enhanced until earlier this week. It took me a bit longer to get everything set up than I would like, since I've become used to Rick handling our build-related issues, but I'm ready to start porting my changes over. Based on the Apple hardware we each own right now, it's safe to say that Rick will be focusing on the Intel side of things, while I'll be working on the PowerPC binaries. This will still be a part-time project for me while I finish up those other things, so I wouldn't expect anything significant for at least a week.

We haven't synced our codebases yet, but Rick mentions that his development is stalled until he figures out why Apple's memcpy hasn't been working for him. Either way, we still have to discuss how exactly our optimizations are going to work (optimizing from scratch vs. copying over the code we've written for SETI 4.18). I'm opting for the former, since from what I can tell, some of the optimizations we've found have been independently discovered by other coders, and I've certainly allowed my codebase to grow increasingly sloppy as time goes on, so I wouldn't mind starting from scratch. I'm still waiting for Rick to weigh in with his opinion, though.

Pay close attention to the release of the wisdom tool that Rick will be releasing. Unless stock SETI Enhanced is less optimized than I think it is, it may be possible that wisdom collection will make the biggest difference in performance of any optimizations we perform. SETI Enhanced does something similar to what I did with alpha-5.2 and alpha-5.3, meaning that it loads and stores wisdom (in a file called wisdom.sah, rather than bigfft_wisdom), but it does this on-the-fly, and with less thorough (and therefore much less optimal) planning. Don't try anything like renaming your copies of bigfft_wisdom, as tempting as it might sound, since alpha-5.2 and alpha-5.3 were compiled against a slightly older version of FFTW, whose wisdom is incompatible with the FFTW version that Enhanced uses. Just wait for the wisdom tool and generate new wisdom that way.

Hang in there, guys, you'll be back up to speed soon!
     
lepetitmartien
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May 21, 2006, 06:06 AM
 
Chorus: Yeah happy happy joy joy!
MacMusic.Org says "Hi all!" :)
G5 desktop 1.8, 900 MHz frontbus (2003 model)
Latest wisdom file for it on demand, just PM me :)
     
mac1896
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May 21, 2006, 02:49 PM
 
To Alex and Rick, from all us Mac users a great big "Thank You"for all the past work, current work, and any future work that you put into optimizing seti clients for us.

To boog also, a big round of applause (cheers too) for your current effort to help us whip the tar out of the PC crunchers.

Should I ever run into you guys at any point in my life, the drinks are on me !!

Kevin
     
Uchujin Daisuki
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May 27, 2006, 01:13 AM
 
Alex-san, Boog-san, and Rick-san,

Open Source? Tokyo de biiru o ogorimasu! Dai nama. Itsu demo. Kasei de no hou ga ii desu!

Please favor me.

Daisuki
     
Gecko_r7
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May 27, 2006, 02:40 AM
 
Originally Posted by alexkan
Hang in there, guys, you'll be back up to speed soon!
Thanks Alex! The PC guys are getting pretty cocky on the forums in their enthusiasm having a leg-up w/ Crunch3rs opt ap. Heck, they're already referring to PPC crunchers in the past tense like we're dead and buried. To quote Python, "I'm not dead yet!" Would love for my G4 to "go out swinging" wielding your best work, if you guys have it in you for one last campaign

Regards.
     
alexkan  (op)
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May 27, 2006, 03:36 AM
 
Originally Posted by Gecko_r7
Thanks Alex! The PC guys are getting pretty cocky on the forums in their enthusiasm having a leg-up w/ Crunch3rs opt ap. Heck, they're already referring to PPC crunchers in the past tense like we're dead and buried. To quote Python, "I'm not dead yet!" Would love for my G4 to "go out swinging" wielding your best work, if you guys have it in you for one last campaign

Regards.
I've posted the beginnings of a PPC-optimized Enhanced worker in boog's thread. I don't intend to let PPC die with a whimper if I can help it.
     
lepetitmartien
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May 27, 2006, 01:05 PM
 
Thanks alexkan, we're on a mission to save the Quads! LOL
MacMusic.Org says "Hi all!" :)
G5 desktop 1.8, 900 MHz frontbus (2003 model)
Latest wisdom file for it on demand, just PM me :)
     
reader50
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Jun 10, 2006, 11:21 AM
 
( Last edited by reader50; Jun 10, 2006 at 11:41 AM. )
     
reader50
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Jun 10, 2006, 11:26 AM
 
With the advent of the Enhanced SETI client, a new thread was started for optimized workers specific to the Enhanced version. This older thread has gotten very long, and much of the info is outdated since Berkeley no longer issues work for the older worker.

I've closed this thread. Please continue discussion in the newer thread. Not to worry, it's up to six pages already. It will feel just like home.

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=295708
     
 
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