Posts by muddocktor

1) Message boards : Number crunching : need to many memory! (Message 73207) Posted 4 Jun 2012 by muddocktor Post: I see it as a positive thing. It shows real science is being made :D And I see it as a big negative. Either BOINC or the Rosetta app that runs under it doesn't know how to play nice when the work units take up 1/2-1 gig of ram each and will bring even a strong performing machine to it's knees with it killing the hard drive using the swap file. Plus, it is not easy to figure out how to stop this behavior in the client. I have pretty much switched my machines off Rosetta because of this, because I will not tolerate an app that I run out of the kindness of my heart and pocket start making my computing experience with the machine be like dog poo. So now my hex core system and another system now are running Seti because the work units from Rosetta were thrashing the hard drives with swap file usage. The hex core has 6 gigs of ram installed and the other machine had 4 gigs of ram installed, so it's not like they didn't have a good amount of ram in either.
2) Message boards : Number crunching : New build aftermarket fan compatibility (Message 73206) Posted 4 Jun 2012 by muddocktor Post: That heatsink will work either on the previous generation LGA1156 boards and also the present generation LGA1155 boards. Intel didn't change up the mounting hole spacing between the 2. But,if you can go $30 delivered, Newegg has a very good deal right now on the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO heatsink, which is much better than that Startech thing. And I can verify that the EVO will mount on LGA1155.
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems and Technical Issues with Rosetta@home (Message 72584) Posted 24 Mar 2012 by muddocktor Post: I've run into a problem with Rosetta and memory usage on one of my machines. I came in from the rig (work offshore) and found one of my crunchers almost totally unresponsive, with Rosetta thrashing the living hell out of the hard drive because of swap file usage by Rosetta. This particular machine is an i7 2600k that I had set to run at 4400 and had 4 gigs of ram installed in it. Once I was able to get BOINC shut down, the machine started responding normally and the hard drive thrashing went away. I tried turning off swap file usage by setting swap file usage to 0, but upon rebooting the system still found it thrashing the hard drive. Luckily, I have an extra set of 2 x 4GB ram that wasn't in use and just replaced the 2 x 2GB kit that was in it. After rebooting, the computer is now running essentially normal and is responsive. Since I can now see what is going on there, I opened up task manager and see that of the 8 processes of Rosetta running, 7 of them are using 500+ megs of ram each and the last one is just under 400 megs of ram. In my opinion, Rosetta is getting way to greedy about the memory footprint they are taking on our machines. No wonder this poor system was brought to it's knees because it didn't have enough free ram to do crap. Is there a way to set a maximum ram usage requirement in preferences? I know about the one in the BOINC preferences page and have set that already, which didn't make a bit of difference. I was planning to sell that kit of ram, since it's some very expensive ram that I could use the money on for other things. If Rosetta keeps getting a larger and larger memory footprint, I might be forced to go to some other project that knows how to keep from bringing a modern system to it's knees like this.
4) Message boards : Number crunching : These 7 files will not upload. (Message 72032) Posted 9 Jan 2012 by muddocktor Post: I would suggest that it is likely that this one upload server simply has not completed it's upgrade yet, and that it will come back online soon. And therefore no action is required. When the server comes back online, BOINC will finally have a retry that works. To do other things risks corrupting files which potentially effects your whole boat of tasks. Aborting the transfer will be throwing away the work you've done, and the credit you've earned for that work. ...having said that, the suggestion below to hit an alternate upload server should be processed normally if you are comfortable achieving the redirection via the hosts file, etc. I just got in from the rig after being offshore for 2 weeks and found a few hundred work units hung like this on my machines. I applied the hosts file fix and I have been able to upload the stuck processed work units this way, so the advice given above works. As for me, I think I will move Back to Seti for a while and let Rosetta work through their issues with the move. It would have been nice if they had posted advanced warning of the move, since I work in remote areas and leave my systems crunching while at work. I would have set Seti to run while the move was going on before I left for the rig.
5) Message boards : Number crunching : About ready to REMOVE Rosetta@home (Message 71637) Posted 24 Nov 2011 by muddocktor Post: I just ran into a problem with some work right now that is thrashing my hard drive to death. I'm not sure which of the work units is doing it, but my hard drive light is staying continuously lit while Rosetta is processing. If I snooze the client, the hard drive activity light returns to more normal patterns. Someone let some bad wus out it looks like to me. Everything is responding dog slow while running Rosetta because it's thrashing the crap out of my hard drive. If this continues, I will just back to Seti or some other BOINC project because I'm not going to let Rosetta kill my hard drive and make using my computer be a crappy experience. If the unit is not too far along just kill it and move to the next one and see if it does the same thing. You killing a unit, or even a batch of units, isn't going to throw the Project off the cliff. The units will just get sent out to other pc's to crunch, some people are running Boinc on an SSD drive so no thrashing for them. I ended up having to dump every wu on that machine, because I couldn't find which one (or series) was thrashing my drive and tying my system in knots. After dumping them, I tried to get some new work but the server only sent me 8 wus to crunch, which were done by the time I woke up this morning. Since the server won't send me more work for another 15 hours or so, I have that machine crunching some Seti work at present. BTW, I am having no thrashing problem while processing the Seti work, so it's not client or machine related.
6) Message boards : Number crunching : About ready to REMOVE Rosetta@home (Message 71634) Posted 24 Nov 2011 by muddocktor Post: I just ran into a problem with some work right now that is thrashing my hard drive to death. I'm not sure which of the work units is doing it, but my hard drive light is staying continuously lit while Rosetta is processing. If I snooze the client, the hard drive activity light returns to more normal patterns. Someone let some bad wus out it looks like to me. Everything is responding dog slow while running Rosetta because it's thrashing the crap out of my hard drive. If this continues, I will just back to Seti or some other BOINC project because I'm not going to let Rosetta kill my hard drive and make using my computer be a crappy experience.
7) Message boards : Number crunching : About ready to REMOVE Rosetta@home (Message 71232) Posted 9 Sep 2011 by muddocktor Post: Maybe he got some bad work units. I had this happen to me a couple of months ago on my main system, which is a 980X with 6 gigs of ram. Until those work units got on the machine, I had no problems leaving BOINC crunching while using the computer. But I came in from offshore and when I went to try to use that machine, everything was responding like dog poop. I finally figured it was some bad work units, which I deleted. Once that series was deleted, I had no further problems.
8) Message boards : Number crunching : Can someone game the BOINC software and/ or misrepresent the cpu reporting? (Message 71231) Posted 9 Sep 2011 by muddocktor Post: Thanks for the answers you all. That makes much more sense now, even though that is beyond my capabilities. I bet you could get some people scratching their heads if you did this with a cluster of around 4 2600k machines though. That would show up as a 2600k processor making around 24-25k RAC. ;)
9) Message boards : Number crunching : Can someone game the BOINC software and/ or misrepresent the cpu reporting? (Message 71206) Posted 7 Sep 2011 by muddocktor Post: I noticed a very strange anomaly with one of the top producers of this project that prompted this thread. This person has 30+ computers now active and quite a few of them are showing 5000+ RAC. But according to the cpu type being reported to the project, they are T7700 Intel procs and that kind of RAC from that dual core proc is simply impossible. To make that kind of RAC, you are going to need some kind of quad core i5 or i7 Intel processor, and overclocked at that. As far as what is being reported as an OS, it is listed as "Linux 2.6.35-22-virtual". My question is this: Is this virtual Linux OS misreporting the cpu? Or some other weird anomaly due to the virtual Linux OS? BTW, I have a pretty good idea of what a T7700 proc should be producing, since I crunch on a Mac Mini that I upgraded to a T7600, which is a 2.33 GHz proc and I also crunch on my laptop, which has a T9600 proc at 2.8 GHz. The T9600 on a good day might get around 1100 RAC and the T7600 hovers between 800-900 RAC. Also, could it possibly be someone found a way to game the credit system?
10) Message boards : Number crunching : which cpu´s are you using for rosetta? (Message 70888) Posted 4 Aug 2011 by muddocktor Post: 1. i7 980X @ 4.0 2. i7 2600k @ 4.5 3. i7 2600k @ 4.4 4. QX9650 @ 4.0 5. T7600 @ 2.33 (Mac Mini) 6. T9600 @ 2.8 7. i7 930 @ 4.0 (sometimes, when not testing heatsinks)
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Problems and Technical Issues with Rosetta@home (Message 70843) Posted 1 Aug 2011 by muddocktor Post: That's all fine and dandy, Sid, but taking 5 minutes out of their day to post a message like Rocco Moretti posted before running out of work is not asking a whole lot and it would help keep people informed and they could make plans in advance to set up another project to switch to in case of time such as this. In my situation for example, I am at work on a drilling rig hundreds of miles away from my computers, which I presently have set to run 100% Rosetta. If I knew this was coming up I could have set them up to run another project too, in case something happened with Rosetta (like now). My machines still seem to be crunching work units for now, but when they run out the 5 systems at the house will not be doing any work, just burning my electricity for no return. And that could simply be minimized or eliminated by a little better communication from the Baker Labs. That is what gets people upset, not the point that they ran out of work.
12) Message boards : Number crunching : Project File Upload Handler Is Missing (Message 69067) Posted 9 Jan 2011 by muddocktor Post: I'm sitting here with well over a hundred results files that won't upload. :( I've had a few that have uploaded, but many more that won't. [rant] You know, I left the Seti project and attached to this one because of server based problems. Now it's looking to me like the same shoestring mentality is ruling this project too, as concerns the servers and database. I don't know much about setting up the hardware to run a project such as this, but I would think that primary consideration would be given to make a robust data handling system with redundancies and it looks to me like academia in general doesn't seem to think (to me at least) that making sure your infrastructure is robust enough to take into account the possibility of equipment failure bringing an entire project to a screeching halt. Spend more money on your project infrastructure before you go on dreaming new methods to crunch numbers or whatever, you all. I have seen this with this project, Seti and also the Folding@Home project run by Stanford, although theirs seems to be more a problem with dreaming up new clients and never getting the bugs worked out of their older DC clients. I hope that you all can get this back up and running soon. Otherwise, I guess I will move on to someone else's project, since it ticks me off to have something I am donating my time to by running their project (and paying the electricity for to run their project on my computers) not take some precautions to keep their project going by providing redundancy in their project's infrastructure to handle hardware failure. [/rant]
13) Message boards : Number crunching : Not building up any cache of work after BOINC upgrade. (Message 65489) Posted 8 Mar 2010 by muddocktor Post: Hey you all, I recently upgraded the BOINC client from 6.6.36 to 6.10.18 due to wanting to run some cuda work on Seti while keeping my cpu available for Rosetta. Before the upgrade, I had a decent cache of Rosetta work units. I did the upgrade to BOINC, when I restarted BOINC it trashed all the work units. That was a first for me, as I have upgraded BOINC numerous times in the past while running Seti with no problems. Now, after the client upgrade, my machine won't build up any extra work units as a cache supply of them. And the work units I've been getting are really big, but right now I have a grand total of the 4 work units I'm presently processing and no extra wu's cached for Rosetta. And I have just a small supply of Seti wu's for gpu processing, which I only let it do when the machine isn't in use. I've gone through my computing preferences and it is still showing my previous preferences set for this project. One other thing I just thought of that happened right after the upgrade was that the project registered the computer as another system being added and I had to merge the accounts to get it back to 1 account. I don't like running without at least some kind of cache of work units on my machine. Do you all have any insight why my machine won't get more work cached? I just looked at your computers and they all seem to have a nice cache of more than half a dozen units each. It seems to have fixed itself. Actually, if you look at the QX9650 computer, you will see only 4 wu's being not already finished on it. The 4 shown as In Progress are the ones it is actually processing. And at the very back of the tasks shown for that computer there are 13 tasks shown as No Reply, which were work units that the BOINC client upgrade trashed on this system. That part really cheesed me off there as I've never had a simple BOINC client upgrade just totally bork my wu cache before.
14) Message boards : Number crunching : Not building up any cache of work after BOINC upgrade. (Message 65476) Posted 7 Mar 2010 by muddocktor Post: Hey you all, I recently upgraded the BOINC client from 6.6.36 to 6.10.18 due to wanting to run some cuda work on Seti while keeping my cpu available for Rosetta. Before the upgrade, I had a decent cache of Rosetta work units. I did the upgrade to BOINC, when I restarted BOINC it trashed all the work units. That was a first for me, as I have upgraded BOINC numerous times in the past while running Seti with no problems. Now, after the client upgrade, my machine won't build up any extra work units as a cache supply of them. And the work units I've been getting are really big, but right now I have a grand total of the 4 work units I'm presently processing and no extra wu's cached for Rosetta. And I have just a small supply of Seti wu's for gpu processing, which I only let it do when the machine isn't in use. I've gone through my computing preferences and it is still showing my previous preferences set for this project. One other thing I just thought of that happened right after the upgrade was that the project registered the computer as another system being added and I had to merge the accounts to get it back to 1 account. I don't like running without at least some kind of cache of work units on my machine. Do you all have any insight why my machine won't get more work cached?
15) Message boards : Number crunching : When will cuda support be ready ? (Message 64823) Posted 5 Jan 2010 by muddocktor Post: If I'm not mistaken, the Seti GPU client was pretty much written for them by Nvidia and not Berkeley. So I would imagine that someone would have to see if they could interest either Nvidia or AMD in this project and look into getting them to write a GPU app for Rosetta.
16) Message boards : Number crunching : Servers running, but no work available?? (Message 55350) Posted 28 Aug 2008 by muddocktor Post: My other projects are Malaria and Spinhenge (along with the 'classic' SETI, Einstein, Climate and World Grid). Please help me feed my QX; the Seti wu's are not too filling and it wants a good Rosetta meal! :D If you want something filling, though not quite as tasty as Rosetta, you could always crunch some World Community Grid (Conquer Cancer, or Proteome phase 2), or BOINC Simap :) Thanks for the info, but that machine managed to snag some Rosetta wu's last night while I was sleeping. Woke up this morning and it's happily crunching some new Rosetta work.
17) Message boards : Number crunching : Servers running, but no work available?? (Message 55340) Posted 28 Aug 2008 by muddocktor Post: I have a QX9650 that is just waiting to get some Rosetta goodness on it again. It ran out this morning and the server doesn't seem to want to give it any more and it's hungry. Please help me feed my QX; the Seti wu's are not too filling and it wants a good Rosetta meal! :D