Posts by Aglarond

1) Message boards : Number crunching : Major User and Host increase!? (Message 17778) Posted 6 Jun 2006 by Aglarond Post: Maybe also article on CNN.com helped a little.
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Report Problems with Rosetta Version 5.16 II (Message 17719) Posted 6 Jun 2006 by Aglarond Post: Looks like it might be prudent to take this computer off of Rosetta. It has well below the minimum 500mb recommended, and it is probably not fair to the project to have all these units abort because of that... Just a thought! Yes, I took it off Rosetta immediately. And also other computer with 256MB RAM. New workunits are taking A LOT of RAM. I've seen Rosetta using 375MB recently. So I recommend everyone with less than 512MB to be carefull.
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Is this for real??? (Message 17718) Posted 6 Jun 2006 by Aglarond Post: I just want to point out two things: it is very simple to claim more credits than you deserve for work you have done for Rosetta some people are crunching for rosetta, because it is possible to have big credits, and some people leave Rosetta, because it is not fair Now reasons: I have tried it on six different computers and it was no problem to start claiming 10 times more. My computers were doing the same work in the same time, only they were asking 10 times bigger credits. (I'm not doing it now, because I believe it should be changed) Among other people that avoid Rosetta because of credit cheating is also one Akos F. who helped with optimizing several other projects. And why credits matter at all? Dr. Baker is talking about credits and has also started a competition for most credits during CASP. It means Dr. Baker thinks that credits and competition is important. And I think that cheating (claiming more credits than you deserve) violate this competition.
4) Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : DISCUSSION of Rosetta@home Journal (2) (Message 17589) Posted 4 Jun 2006 by Aglarond Post: Why Rosetta, currently, does not use any optimization ? Using 3Dnow! (for Atlhon XP+) and (sse2 for Pentium IV & others) can shirink the CPU time required to finish a float-point WU by 6 times (1:6) So, why not ? Hmm.. I was thinking about the same few weeks ago. But I've read some posts from Akos F. and he explained, that just compilig with 3Dnow or sse2 may increase the speed by only 3%. If you want bigger increase you have to do some low-level programming in assembler. This is that "magic" that can give you 600% increase in speed. Of course 3Dnow and sse2 can be strong tools, but not by itself. They has to be used the right way.
5) Message boards : Number crunching : limiting cpu usage to less than 90%? (Message 17588) Posted 3 Jun 2006 by Aglarond Post: BoincStudio contains special version of Boinc, that can limit cpu usage. After installing you have to change the cpu_usage_limit setting in the bs_opts.xml file. Just replace the number in the line containing: <cpu_usage_limit>-1.00</cpu_usage_limit> with number between 0.00 and 1.00 . For example if you want 90%, you would use: <cpu_usage_limit>0.90</cpu_usage_limit>
6) Message boards : Number crunching : Is this for real??? (Message 17587) Posted 3 Jun 2006 by Aglarond Post: To John: I've stumbled into this thread................ I am no way a techy the way some of you guys seem to be. I started running BOINC about 18 months ago. If it is true that 'cheating' is going on, then is it worth any of us actually continuing? Yes, it is worth. Rosetta is about science, that can help many people. This cheating we are all talking about don't have any impact on science. Credits are here only for people that care about credits :) People on this thread are just trying to say, that credits should be counted in another way. To Mike: Aglarond: I don't understand your comment about crunching 24/7 means cheating is likely? Mad credit per day, yes, I understand that, but I don't follow the second half of your argument. I wanted to say that if someone is crunching 12 hours for Rosetta and 12 hours for Einstein, then I see reason for using optimized boinc (5.5.0). However if he is crunching 24 hours for Rosetta, there is no need to use optimized boinc. Why would someone spend time installing special boinc client on computer, that is crunching only for Rosetta? There are some legitimate reasons, but it is very likely that it was for higher credit claims.
7) Message boards : Number crunching : Report Problems with Rosetta Version 5.16 II (Message 17584) Posted 3 Jun 2006 by Aglarond Post: I had many errors with FRA_t301_hom028_1_LOOPRLX_IGNORE_THE_REST recently. Probably Rosetta needed to use more than 300MB RAM and system was out of memory. I've got two different error codes: -1073741819 (0xc0000005) and -1073741571 (0xc00000fd) . Results: 22632143 22629987 22628762 22626932 22625240 22624321 22623307 22593482 22585478
8) Message boards : Number crunching : Is this for real??? (Message 17582) Posted 3 Jun 2006 by Aglarond Post: it's no harder than modifying SOME XML file in SOME way after your BOINC benchmark runs. This has gone on since the start of Boinc. The DC project developers have allowed this to continue because it encourages users to crunch the WUs. After all, the credits cost the DC project nothing. I believe the ignoring of credit exploitation is a compromise of ethics and is bad behaviour on the part of the DC project developers. Yap, it is too easy. But only on Rosetta, in other projects you need to meet another cheater on the same WU. Actually I tried it on one of my computers. I moved decimal point just by one number from 1313.28 to 13132.8 and from 2730.351 to 27303.51 . From that moment on, it got 10 times more credit for every WU. It is too easy to cheat. Dr. Baker is encouraging teams to compete, to be the team that did most work done during CASP7. But what is this all about, when it is so easy to cheat? And I believe that there are some people cheating in all major teams. Think about this: BoincStudio comes with Boinc version 5.5.0 . This version can give you more credits, but you have to turn credit correction on. It makes perfect sense to use it on Einstein, Seti or Sztaki, when someone uses optimized applications. However why would someone use it, if he is crunching 24 hours a day for rosetta? If you want some evidence for cheating, look at members of teams that earns most credits. Look at their computers, and pick some with big RAC. Look at any crunched result and if you see boinc version 5.5.0 he is probably cheating. And if he crunches 24 hours a day, he is very likely to cheat. You can count it this way: Pick one computer, count sum of all results that this computer did yesterday. Divide it by the number of CPUs this computer has. If it is over 60000s, this computer is obviously crunching Rosetta 24 hours a day. When I was writing this message, this computer was perfect example of what I'm talking about. It had FLOPS=4542 and IOPS=14766. When I looked at some random result, it was using boinc 5.5.0 and sum of CPU times of crunched units on 2.6.2006 was 141278. Computer has 2 CPUs. That makes over 70000s per day and that means this computer is crunching only for Rosetta. To owner of this computer: Please don't be angry at me, I just had to pick someone as example.
9) Message boards : Number crunching : Is this for real??? (Message 17401) Posted 30 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: I was using Boincstudio with optimization on Rosetta for a few days on 6 different computers and there was one common thing. All computers had FLOPS+IOPS between 9500 - 12500. And all of them were claiming around 50-70 credits for 10000s WU. Actually P3 500MHz 160MB RAM was claiming very similar credits to A64 3200+ 1GB RAM. As I'm looking at credit claims of other people, those who has high claims has often FLOPS and IOPS like 3693 and 6249 (together 9942) and are claiming around 60 credits per WU. It looks pretty familiar. Now I think this is the way how to recognize BoincStudio clients with optimization turned on. +++ Update: +++ I was looking at top 10 members of several random teams. My small statistic is pretty simple: every second user is cheating with credit claims! (I was not counting users with hidden computers. Together I was counting around 30-40 users. I treated user as cheating, when at least one of his computers has benchmarks more than 2 times higher as what I would expect for that particular processor type.)
10) Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : CAN YOU HELP ROSETTA?? (Message 17356) Posted 30 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: May I suggest one change on Rosetta website? There is System requirements link on main Rosetta page. And it has headline "Recommended System Requirements". However later in text it is referred as "minimum system requirements". And all requirements asks for 512MB RAM. I'm running Rosetta successfully on computer with 160MB RAM. So I think there should be clearly written what are RECOMMENDED requirements and what are MINIMAL requirements.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Report Problems with Rosetta Version 5.16 II (Message 17325) Posted 29 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: I had another one of that nasty R@H screensaver crashes. It was result T0283_CONTACTS_CONSERVATIVE_HALFHB_MAP_FROM_hom006_575_8907_0. However today I zipped memory dump that windows was going to send to microsoft. If you think it will help you, you can download WERa78d.dir00.zip (16.1 MB). (I will leave it there for download for at least a month) I was also thinking why this happens only on this particular computer. This is only one of my computers, that has localized version of windows (Slovak language version). Do you think it can be the reason for screensaver crash?
12) Message boards : Number crunching : Report Problems with Rosetta Version 5.16 I (Message 16974) Posted 24 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: BAD ERROR! Boinc 5.4.9 crunching WU t283__CASP7_ABRELAX_SAVE_ALL_OUT_hom024__528_13504_0, screensaver appeared.. suddenly windows error message appeared about Rosetta@home doing illegal operation and windows had to end this process.. "send report to microsoft? [send] [don't send]" you probably know that message.. after closing the message: boinc happily crunches another WU.. now it looks like it was normal computing error .. but it wasn't ..
13) Message boards : Number crunching : Report Problems with Rosetta Version 5.16 I (Message 16790) Posted 21 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: LINUX problem: I need help with this problem: while running Rosetta on Linux server with PentiumIV HyperThreading processor, Rosetta occasionally hangs in a very strange state: everything is running except Rosetta. Boinc is running. Application on other thread (Simap@home) is running. Just Rosetta isn't. I had encountered this particular issue back in Jan/Feb-06 (also under Linux). Overall about 5-6 times. BOINC log would show that boinc restarted Rosetta, but the Rosetta process would just stay "idle" (ps flags were "SN"=sleep,nice consuming no CPU time) for hours/days, until I manually killed it (I guess nowadays the "watchdog" thread will catch it). I don't think Watchdog can catch it, because whole process is sleeping.. it was in this state for more than 2 days and watchdog didn't catch it. At the time, I thought it was an issue with Rosetta+BOINC interaction, as I think it happened upon resuming a Rosetta WU (with leave-in-mem=yes). At the time, I also suspected some issue with the system's resources, as that PC had only 256MB RAM and I was running 6 BOINC projects and 100+ processes. I also have leave-in-mem=yes .. and it can be something with memory, as this is primarily webserver and it has only 1GB RAM so it can be low on RAM from time to time.. It COULD have been a faulty WU, but when I ran that WU with rosetta commandline outside BOINC and it completed fine. No it wasn't faulty WU. After restarting boinc, both WUs were completed successfully.
14) Message boards : Number crunching : Report Problems with Rosetta Version 5.16 I (Message 16730) Posted 21 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: LINUX problem: I need help with this problem: while running Rosetta on Linux server with PentiumIV HyperThreading processor, Rosetta occasionally hangs in a very strange state: everything is running except Rosetta. Boinc is running. Application on other thread (Simap@home) is running. Just Rosetta isn't. Processor is showing 50% idle. After some time Boinc decides to switch apps and Rosetta is preempted and there are 2 Simaps happily running. After some more time Boinc decides do switch apps and there are 2 Rosettas hanging and processor is 100% idle. And so on. After 2 days I stopped Boinc and run it again and both Rosettas started to work normally. This didn't happen for the first time. I even tried to attach to RALPH some time ago, but it never occured there. It happens once in a 2-3 weeks. Here are the results: (both are valid, but has something in stderr) 20587857 20574470 Do you have any idea what can be wrong? Is it a bug in Rosetta, or is there some problem with server, where I run it? (btw, yes I have permission from servers admin to run Boinc there)
15) Message boards : Number crunching : Are these benchmarks right? (Message 16498) Posted 18 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: I've run the benchmarks a couple of times and its about the same. New computer has fedora core 5 dual Xeon 2.80 ghz processors 2 gig memory. I had similar problem with Pentium IV 3.2Ghz HT processor running Linux. Combination of HT and Linux gives extra low benchmarks. I have found several people that were recommending using optimized Boinc core client to compensate for this. I have tried several of them and Crunch3r's was most stable and reliable for me. If you want, you may give it a try: http://calbe.dw70.de/boinc.html The best version for you will probably be: Boinc 5.2.14 P4/Athlon64 SSE2 After some experimenting you should be able to find optimized Boinc client, that will give you approximately the same amount that Windows clients gets.
16) Message boards : Number crunching : Report Problems with Rosetta Version 5.16 I (Message 16496) Posted 18 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: Result 20512608 has Exit status -1073741811 (0xc000000d) ... watchdog has killed it. BTW thanks for watchdog, it helps.
17) Message boards : Number crunching : Report Problems with Rosetta Version 5.16 I (Message 16487) Posted 17 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: I have an issue with screensaver on my notebook. While crunching WU named NO_STRING_RELAX_1mky_ROT_TRIALS_TRIE_CHECKPOINTS_483_958_1 that grey lines that divides screen into parts are randomly changing level of grey and sometimes they disapper for a while. I didn't see it on any other WU before. It is happening in screensaver and also when showing graphics in window.
18) Message boards : Number crunching : RAC cheats, is this a problem (Message 16270) Posted 14 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: P.S. one idea: what about kindly asking Akos Fekete, who made optimizations on Einstein, if he could look at Rosetta and try to make optimizations here? Although, it may be necessary to pay him for his effort, as he is rather busy. Update: David has contacted Akos, but he will stay with Einstein for now.
19) Message boards : Number crunching : Improvements to Rosetta@home based on user feedback (Message 16057) Posted 12 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: I posted this idea on other thread, but now I think it belongs here: What about kindly asking Akos Fekete, who made optimizations on Einstein, if he could look at Rosetta and try to make optimizations here? Although, it may be necessary to pay him for his effort, as he is rather busy.
20) Message boards : Number crunching : Report Problems with Rosetta Version 5.13 (Message 16056) Posted 12 May 2006 by Aglarond Post: I think it should be mentioned in the text below models why we don't see RMSD. Now it is really confusing for people who don't know what's going on. And to say something about Kerwins problem.. few days ago I had problems running one application on computer with ATI Radeon7000 .. after contacting the support staff they told me, that this graphic card model has problems with OpenGL. I had to replace it.

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