Posts by PCZ

1) Message boards : Number crunching : BOINC over a cluster (Message 8228) Posted 3 Jan 2006 by PCZ Post: What you have seen described as a discless stack are PXE boot nodes. I and many others use these. Basically you have one Server which runs DHCP, TFTP and NFS. The nodes are just basic MB's without any HD's. The nodes boot up over the network and load a kernel via TFTP. The OS is then mounted as an NFS share from the Server. There are other NFS shares setup for the various DC projects that you want to run. So the nodes have no HD's and all there files are on a central Server. However once booted they are individual entities, each node runs it's own copy of boinc. You control them via telnet or SSH. Each one of the discless nodes is infact a linux PC but without Screen or HD's. Folks use these clusters because the node cost is very low, just MB, RAM, CPU and PSU. Adding extra nodes only takes seconds, all that is required to add a node is a quick edit of dhcpd.conf to add the MAC address and some NFS exports for the new node. These PXE stacks are not true clusters as in they are not slaves to the central server, they are individual PC's using resources provided by a Server but not controlled by it.
2) Message boards : Number crunching : Windows 98 question (Message 7434) Posted 23 Dec 2005 by PCZ Post: I think IBM started running drivers in ring 0 before MS did. They were trying to speed up OS2.
3) Message boards : Number crunching : Time to introduce the Quorum System (Message 7097) Posted 21 Dec 2005 by PCZ Post: Admins I know you think it is a waste of resources but it is necessary for the continued good reputation of the project. Do you want this project to be famous for its science or the ease at which contributers can cheat on credit ?
4) Message boards : Number crunching : Please abort WUs with (Message 7082) Posted 21 Dec 2005 by PCZ Post: Hopefully most of the bad WU's are gone. I have detached and reatached the nodes which had exceeded their daily limit. All nodes back up and running :) PS Whats MORE_FRAGS a WU for Gamers ?
5) Message boards : Number crunching : Please abort WUs with (Message 7054) Posted 21 Dec 2005 by PCZ Post: Those boxes are out of work. As i said 51 duff WU's in a row and your daily limit is then lower than you have already downloaded. Successful WU's may well increase your daily limit but it never rises above 100 per CPU. So you get 51 crappy WU's in a row and you ain't crunching anymore. It took very little time to download those duff WU's.
6) Message boards : Number crunching : Please abort WUs with (Message 7036) Posted 21 Dec 2005 by PCZ Post: Well I'm seeing "reached daily quota of 49 results" on quite a few of my boxes. The daily limit soon falls from 100. 51 bad WU's and your out of there. Boincview is a sea of red :(
7) Message boards : Number crunching : Credit posting screwiness (Message 6966) Posted 21 Dec 2005 by PCZ Post: Therefore it would also make sense for the decision (i.e. option to enable/disable) to be given to the project so they can take advantage of their superior hardware or help out there minimal hardware. Heh careful where you point that common sense :)
8) Message boards : Number crunching : Credit posting screwiness (Message 6911) Posted 20 Dec 2005 by PCZ Post: Yep I'm afraid your guilty as charged. :) Heh ive got an idea. I could run a boinc project on that 386 in the corner. Got a couple of 80MB ESDI's for storage. UM! i could back up the database on that old Jumbo 120. Does the boinc software come on floppies ? "Since the point of the BOINC System is to enable projects to be created and run on minimal hardware" Thats scary.
9) Message boards : Number crunching : Credit posting screwiness (Message 6880) Posted 20 Dec 2005 by PCZ Post: I've never bought into the reasons for delaying reporting either. Seems that having to report seperately is a design flaw in the first place. The Fanboys will try to convince you that this is a good thing, it is not. It is a failed attempt to ease the load on underspeced hardware that is to the detriment of us contributors. The only way to restore the lost funtionality is to use an official client. It is unfortunate that participants in well run projects such as this one, have to suffer because of other poorly managed projects using the boinc framework.
10) Message boards : Number crunching : Credit posting screwiness (Message 6879) Posted 20 Dec 2005 by PCZ Post: I've never bought into the reasons for delaying reporting either. Seems that having to report seperately is a design flaw in the first place. The Fanboys will try to convince you that this is a good thing, it is not. It is a failed attempt to ease the load on underspeced hardware that is to the detriment of us contributors. The only way to restore the lost funtionality is to use an unofficial client. It is unfortunate that participants in well run projects such as this one, have to suffer because of other poorly managed projects using the boinc framework.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Credit posting screwiness (Message 6855) Posted 20 Dec 2005 by PCZ Post: I've never bought into the reasons for delaying reporting either. Seems that having to report seperately is a design flaw in the first place. The Fanboys will try to convince you that this is a good thing, it is not. It is a failed attempt to ease the load on underspeced hardware that is to the detriment of us contributors. The only way to restore the lost funtionality is to use an official client. It is unfortunate that participants in well run projects such as this one, have to suffer because of other poorly managed projects using the boinc framework.
12) Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : No WU download anymore ? (Message 4337) Posted 26 Nov 2005 by PCZ Post: Something was up with the linux work Q last night. A lot of my PC's had run out of work and had the message about there being work for other platforms. The few Windows boxes i have were all fine. A really bad effect of there failure to get any work was that the clients had all backed off for 24 hrs. :) I am going to increase the connect to setting a bit to create more of a buffer incase this happens again.
13) Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : AMD64 Support? (Message 3837) Posted 21 Nov 2005 by PCZ Post: gerrynjr Since you have decided to exclude all 32 bit code from running on your A64 then you will be able to run didly squat. This is a mess of your own making so its unfair to expect the project to waste resources trying to cater to your wims. 64 bit computing is in it's infancy and it will be a long time till you can stop running 32 bit code.
14) Message boards : Number crunching : BOINC 4.79/World Grid 4.19 (Message 3598) Posted 18 Nov 2005 by PCZ Post: WCG now has a Boinc client for Windows as well Thats good. WCG surprised me by bringing out the boinc linux client. The boinc windows application coming so soon is also a surprise. Thats presents me a little bit of a dillema. Do i put all my resources into helping make rosetta better or put resources into a practical application of Rosetta ? Or a bit of both, but what ratio ? Now my head hurts :)
15) Message boards : Number crunching : BOINC 4.79/World Grid 4.19 (Message 3541) Posted 17 Nov 2005 by PCZ Post: Dont confuse the client framework with the applications that run within it. WCG use the UD client framework for windows and boinc client framework for linux. One of the applications that currently run within these frameworks is Rosetta, the same Rosetta that this project is trying to improve.
16) Message boards : Number crunching : How to see how many credits a user has for which team? (Message 3420) Posted 16 Nov 2005 by PCZ Post: It would be nice to see how many points had been contributed by members who have left you team. Having those folks listed would help as well. All we have at the moment are ghost members. Some record of ex member names and what there contribution was would be nice to have. The folks who produce stats could maintain records of all members of a team and when they leave show them in the old team stats even if the official xml had them as ghosts. Not sure its fair to expect them to do that though, the info should really be in the official stats xml files.
17) Message boards : Number crunching : So is it cheating or not? (Message 3401) Posted 16 Nov 2005 by PCZ Post: OK I used the FAH example because i thought it would be familiar to everyone and the quickest way to explain what i meant. Agreed FAH does have problems because of the monster WU they hand out to P4's with SSE2/3 which have a disproportionate amount of credit associated with them. THe FAH system should work i fail to understand how they get the credit so wrong sometimes. I don't think that would happen here though. :) A sample of a new query to be worked on could be run through a test box and the amount of credit for that particular query worked out based on the time it takes to comlete. What should the test box be ? Does it matter ? no not really. If it takes twice as long to do a new query on the test box as the previous query did then it's worth twice the credit simple. As for subscribing to the mailing lists no thanks. I don't believe it would do any good. If the developers did care about the benchmark system they would have fixed it long ago. My first posts on the boinc forums highlighted the problems with the benchmark system. Never once did a developer respond.
18) Message boards : Number crunching : So is it cheating or not? (Message 3394) Posted 16 Nov 2005 by PCZ Post: Folks have been knocking the boinc benchmark system for a long time and rightly so it's a steaming *urd. People have come up with ideas to change it but so far nothing has been implemented, will it be any different this time ? Optimising clients were originally used exclusively by participants running nix. The nix benchmaks being very low compared to windows. They discovered that compiling there own boinc clients using compiler optimisations helped them to bridge the gap with there fellow participants running windows. I have no problem with this at all the windows compiler used for the standard windows clients obviously was using optimisations so doing the same with the nix clients was OK. Also the benchmarks on SMP machines are very very messsed up the more CPU's you have the lower it is. Guys running the big tin are seriously disadvantaged. To a certain extent this is corrected by the quorum system but on projects such as rosetta which dont use it they just get a fraction of the credit they should be claiming. Now the above problem can and is fixed by changing the benchmark figures in one the client files. The figures are altered to bring them them more in line with a UNI processor equivalent. I am not saying that this is the correct course of action but can well understand folks running big tin doing it. What is happening now though is blatant cheating by editing the client xml files and this is getting out of hand. Rosetta doesn't have a quorum so the cheats are getting away with it. The project admins have said that they don't want to waste resources using a quorun system so what can we do ? Right now a quorum is the only option. A quorum of 2 would go a long way towards negating the inflated credit claims. Going forward an alternative benchmark system such as that proposed by Paul could be implemented. How much effort is involved ? and perhaps more importantly would the boinc developers implement it. This problem has been around since day 1 and they don't seem to be interested in fixing it. Another thing that could be done is to assign credit to the WU's like FAH does. IMHO this would be the best system for rosetta. Sure a few WU's might take longer than the average for that protein but equally some will finish quicker than expected so things would even out. I hope this is the last time this monster rears it's ugly head but going on past form i have to bet it won't be.
19) Message boards : Number crunching : Congrats to the rest of Free-DC for hitting #1 team spot (Message 2614) Posted 8 Nov 2005 by PCZ Post: Wait untill we hit Free-DC, Hah ! :):) They already outran us once, simply because the project decided to stop Actually i think you'll find we have done that twice :) Bring it on cow dudes we enjoy a good barbecue.
20) Message boards : Cafe Rosetta : Congrats to Travis Tuck and PCZ (Message 865) Posted 1 Oct 2005 by PCZ Post: Thanks folks It's a nice touch.

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