Posts by EW-3

1) Message boards : Number crunching : Uploading error (Message 69023) Posted 7 Jan 2011 by EW-3 Post: I have been experiencing some problems w/ uploading, starting in late December 2010. Even then, it had been taking multiple tries to u/l completed WU. My last successful u/l was on Jan 3 and I have two pending right now. Has anyone else had problems u/l WU in this time frame? Thanks. yup, sitting on a boatload of finished units.
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems with version 5.96 (Message 53808) Posted 18 Jun 2008 by EW-3 Post: Not exactly germane to this particular issue, the fact I have several computers back at the office who should be cranking right now, but appear to be dead, I was wondering if there might be a method that could permit a remote reset/restart in situations like this?
3) Message boards : Number crunching : "Sneaker-netting" Rosetta: Quad to Laptop (Message 45705) Posted 2 Sep 2007 by EW-3 Post: You've already sold me on the value of a quad-core Bonic Buster.... Those are smoe excellent numbers for that beastie - looks like you are completing 10K cpu second WUs in 30-45 minutes. Am curious, since each CPU has it's own 2MB cache and since Rosetta is likely a very tight looped application the cache must be a perfect match. How much memory of the 2GB you have are the 4 instances of Rosetta actually using? For $500 I can get a motherboard with that CPU and 2GB of memory. For that kind of $$ I just got to get me one of them.
4) Message boards : Number crunching : "Sneaker-netting" Rosetta: Quad to Laptop (Message 45506) Posted 27 Aug 2007 by EW-3 Post: Have been playing with the idea of building a number crunching desktop. So far it looks like I can get a quad core II cpu (2.4ghz), 2 GB of DDR2 memory and a very suitable motherboard for less than $500. The Intel CPU has 4x2MB cache which seems a good thing for Rosetta. Since it will just sit in a corner, I plan on the most limited I/O capabilty, so it will just sit there cranking. Opinions/suggestions?
5) Message boards : Number crunching : "Sneaker-netting" Rosetta: Quad to Laptop (Message 45437) Posted 26 Aug 2007 by EW-3 Post: My Dell 9200 Q6600 quadcore arrived today. Looking forward to your results. After reviewing the way the quad core works on the Intel site, I have to wonder if it really will help much when running a single instance of BOINC manager. Sounds like to really push this puppy you need to try 4 instances to keep the processors busy. Or (question to all out there) does BOINC/Rosetta create multiple threads to take advantage of a multi-CPU machine?
6) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems with Rosetta version 5.64 (Message 40837) Posted 12 May 2007 by EW-3 Post: Must be magic - all OK now ;) 5/12/2007 12:18:45 PM\|rosetta@home\|Sending scheduler request to http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta_cgi/cgi 5/12/2007 12:18:45 PM\|rosetta@home\|Reason: To fetch work 5/12/2007 12:18:45 PM\|rosetta@home\|Requesting 8640 seconds of new work 5/12/2007 12:18:50 PM\|rosetta@home\|Scheduler request succeeded 5/12/2007 12:18:52 PM\|rosetta@home\|Started download of file 1ctf_.fasta 5/12/2007 12:18:52 PM\|rosetta@home\|Started download of file 1ctf_.psipred_ss2.gz 5/12/2007 12:18:53 PM\|rosetta@home\|Finished download of file 1ctf_.fasta Running WIN XP SP2 getting 5/12/2007 11:48:53 AM\|rosetta@home\|Sending scheduler request to http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta_cgi/cgi 5/12/2007 11:48:53 AM\|rosetta@home\|Reason: To fetch work 5/12/2007 11:48:53 AM\|rosetta@home\|Requesting 8640 seconds of new work 5/12/2007 11:48:58 AM\|rosetta@home\|Scheduler request succeeded 5/12/2007 11:48:58 AM\|rosetta@home\|No work from project
7) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems with Rosetta version 5.64 (Message 40830) Posted 12 May 2007 by EW-3 Post: Running WIN XP SP2 getting 5/12/2007 11:48:53 AM\|rosetta@home\|Sending scheduler request to http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta_cgi/cgi 5/12/2007 11:48:53 AM\|rosetta@home\|Reason: To fetch work 5/12/2007 11:48:53 AM\|rosetta@home\|Requesting 8640 seconds of new work 5/12/2007 11:48:58 AM\|rosetta@home\|Scheduler request succeeded 5/12/2007 11:48:58 AM\|rosetta@home\|No work from project
8) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems with Rosetta version 5.41 (Message 32052) Posted 4 Dec 2006 by EW-3 Post: I've had several problems whenever I let the screen saver run, and it goes back to prior versions. But the common item is I have a ATI Radeon Express 200 series interface. just more data for the analysis. FluffyChicken's mention of ATI cards made me go check - not being a gamer I don't especially care what my video card is - and yes, I have an ATI Radeon X300SE video card. I've had no crashes since I turned off the BOINC screen saver. I'd be happy to participate in testing if someone would tell me how to set it up. I've just reset the Rosetta project as instructed; I'll turn the screen saver back on and report results. I'm still seeing 5.41. Let me know if you need details of the video driver I'm using - I don't believe I've ever updated the video drivers. Also, per Feet1st's remark about frames per second and graphics preferences, I am using the system default preferences entirely.
9) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems with Rosetta version 5.40 (Message 31295) Posted 17 Nov 2006 by EW-3 Post: Sign me up as having a problem using the screen saver too.... Things have been running great for the last week or two, and in the last 24s I enabled the screen saver again and I had my first problem since I turned it off. My cure is to keep it off, but maybe you could look into it so you don't loose valuable CPU time.... Thanks,
10) Message boards : Number crunching : Beyond newbie Q&A (Message 30769) Posted 7 Nov 2006 by EW-3 Post: I have tried to bump Rosetta to a realtime priority in XP (home) and it bombs I have to go back to start the WU all over again. Is that a function of the OS? Reason I tried this was to avoid swapping, which would tend to let the L1 and the L2 just sit there and scream... That's strange, when I tried that, it worked just fine, but the system was just completely useless - since all the prcessor time was given to the Rosetta task, and no CPU-time was available to my actions... It also seemed like BOINC was monitoring the priority and resetting it, but I could have that wrong... It sholdn't crash, just not let any other tasks (that aren't also real-time tasks). However, the idea of is that real-time tasks shouldn't run for very long periods at a time, and thus let other tasks run for some time every now and again, and I don't really expect everything in the system to "work fine" if there's tasks running 100% cpu-time for _VERY_ long periods of time - and ther may even be essential tasks that need to be run at lower priority that may cause the system to crash if they are not performed... Cache-content remains between task-switches - but of course, the new task will need to load some things from memory, which will most likely be using the cache, and if the new task is sufficiently complex and/or long-running, it will most likely thrash the entire contents of the cache. But a task-switch to a small process that just updates a few variables shouldn't touch more than a few lines in the cache for the code and data accesssed. If the system isn't really being used for something else [in which case you probably want that to be done, rather than run Rosetta], I wouldn't expect more any measurable difference between real-time and idle-time level priorities -- Mats Just a guess - you are running Linux and XP Pro on your machines, my box has XP home.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Beyond newbie Q&A (Message 30767) Posted 7 Nov 2006 by EW-3 Post: [/quote] There's software that can measure the actual counts of different classes of instructions and memory accesses (not specifically splitting Integer and generic instructions, as they are, in my mind, the same thing - what's the difference between an ADD instruciton used to generate an address and an ADD instruciton used to calculate the result of some mathematcial formula? If the calculation is integer, you use integer instructions, but they aren't different from the ones the compiler uses to calculate various internal stuff that the compiler needs to compute just to get the result of some calculation). Although some of the results may not be precise or the actual value you get may only infer the data you actually asked for (for example you may not be able to see how many cycles are used by the ALU, but only how many cycles are stalled because the ALU is too busy to run the next instruction in the pipeline). Of course, you could also look at the binary of the executable to figure out how much of the code is written to use which part of the processor (and from this you could possibly infer if the result of a calculation is "integer math" or "address calculation" - since this sort of analyzer could analyze more than single instructions and follow the flow of operations - not that it REALLY makes a whole lot of difference). On x86 the number of memory accesses per instruction will always be less or equal to one [with a couple of really rare exceptons, the obvious one being CMPXCHG16B that does two consecutive 8-byte accesses on the bus with an implied LOCK, so we could modify 16 bytes in one instruction). All the common instructions allow only one operand to be a memory operand. Unfortunately, the more complex question here is how many of the memory operands are fetched from L1 cache, how many from L2 cache and how many from "real" memory? That is a much more important question than how many memory accesses the application does, as there's a large amount of extra time spent on a "real" memroy access compared to an L1 cache access, and L2 cache falling somewhere in the middle between the two. -- Mats [/quote] Hadn't thought about the cache memory, that does add a big degree of complexity. Some of that would be the process swap by the OS, but more important would seem to be designing a tight efficient loop to do iterative tasks. Have wondered about something and this might be the right place to ask this question. I have tried to bump Rosetta to a realtime priority in XP (home) and it bombs I have to go back to start the WU all over again. Is that a function of the OS? Reason I tried this was to avoid swapping, which would tend to let the L1 and the L2 just sit there and scream...
12) Message boards : Number crunching : Beyond newbie Q&A (Message 30688) Posted 6 Nov 2006 by EW-3 Post: Thanks guys, as usual I learn a lot here. Am curious about performance (it's in my blood) While we can compare hardware with benchmark programs, is there any metric that actually measures a programs performance for a given platform? Sort of like saying this program uses x% floating point, y% integer, z% generic instructions. Guess we could add the number of memory accesses required per instruction as a further metric. so we have x1, x2, x3....
13) Message boards : Number crunching : Beyond newbie Q&A (Message 30501) Posted 2 Nov 2006 by EW-3 Post: That depends on your budget. More current dual core processors like the AMD64 X2 4400 cost roughly $250 add a MOBO with built in video $60. Add case, PSU, HD, Ram, and OS and you can get a decent system for under 700. Subtract 40 for your existing case, and if you use linux subtract another 100. 512 Mram is generally enough for most boinc projects (per core). Thanks, that's some good input. Suspect I'll wait will after christmas and look for a dual core w 1GB of memory. Are Rosetta apps designed to utilize the extra cpu/memory, or is it a function of the OS (XP in my case)? When I was more active in coding we needed to let the compiler know what functions could be run in a multi-CPU environment. Or am I showing my age? ;)
14) Message boards : Number crunching : Beyond newbie Q&A (Message 30487) Posted 2 Nov 2006 by EW-3 Post: Just getting past being a newbie so I guess this belongs here. I have 2 chasis I want to put new motherboards in. Normally I won't be using these for work, just when I want to do testing. So I was wondering about what people think about my options. Basically it seems to come down to 3 choices. 1. High end dual core systems (too expensive for part time use) 2. Something like I have today (celeron 3.2ghz with .5 GB of memory) 3. Low end, a motherboard that uses the old 133Mhz memories that are dirt cheap. opinions? Also thinking about adding another .5GB of memory to my current machine. Right now when I run Rosetta (without other apps), I am not memory constrained. What effect will adding memory have WRT Rosetta? Will I get WUs that can use the memory? Or will the memory be idle? Thanks, Al
15) Message boards : Number crunching : Report problems with Rosetta version 5.34 (Message 30370) Posted 31 Oct 2006 by EW-3 Post: I may be confused, when I check results it indicates client 5.4.11 Where do I check for the Rosetta version? Or is that the same thing? FWIW - like the last poster I stopped any graphics from running (screensaver) and everything is running great. In fact it even seems to be running faster and smoother (no more hanging up at 1.5% for an hour).
16) Message boards : Number crunching : Report problems with Rosetta version 5.34 (Message 30165) Posted 28 Oct 2006 by EW-3 Post: curious, do you want us to report problems, or does the server see the problems and can fetch our results? Thanks,
17) Message boards : Number crunching : why is this machine failing so much? (Message 29900) Posted 23 Oct 2006 by EW-3 Post: Have also started to get more failing wu's. Is there a running log kept of failures to identify a pattern in the making?
18) Message boards : Number crunching : Archieve of newbie Q&A (Message 29396) Posted 15 Oct 2006 by EW-3 Post: As can be seen from the other thread about "low number of models". All the ones that have failed for you have been the FRA 2rio WUs. One was successfully done but the rest have failed. I think Management should be made aware of this, and an eye kept for others experiencing the same issue. If I were you, I'd do nothing, but keep crunching and see if your machine goes back to normal after these wus are out of your system. P.S this one's a bit tougher. Has the smell of bad memory access issues or memory itself. Thanks Tony. Not sure how to make management aware of this, so I'll have to leave that to you. By bad memory, are you talking hardware, or is it code that is corrupting a chunk of memory...
19) Message boards : Number crunching : Archieve of newbie Q&A (Message 29389) Posted 15 Oct 2006 by EW-3 Post: thanks Tony, just tried it and it works.... you guys are really good! Yeeeeees,.....I pride myself at "being good" on the easier questions....LOL Hi Tony, Hope this is an easy question for you - The last 5 work units have crashed and burned with client errors.... ? Al
20) Message boards : Number crunching : Archieve of newbie Q&A (Message 29358) Posted 15 Oct 2006 by EW-3 Post: thanks Tony, just tried it and it works.... you guys are really good!

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