Posts by Purple Rabbit

21) Message boards : Number crunching : New Rosetta 4.82 (Message 10931) Posted 19 Feb 2006 by Purple Rabbit Post: My first one ran 2:26 hours with a requested 4 hour run. I set the 4 hour limit yesterday so both the server and client know about the 4 hour request. Out of my sample size of one I guess that perhaps the result duration factor (2.0 on this machine) may have influenced the time. It'll probably take few WUs to get the time close.
22) Message boards : Cafe Rosetta : Old Geezers Club (Message 6731) Posted 18 Dec 2005 by Purple Rabbit Post: My first introduction to computers was while I was a Freshman at Case Institute of Technology in 1969 (now Case Western Reserve University much to the chagrin of the old CIT alumni having to associate with those liberal arts types!) I was a hardware Electronic Engineer student. The school knew that computer skills weren't really needed by EE's. We were told that if you had a job to run you would just hand it to the guy/guyette behind the computer shop window. We would never need to sully our fingers with programming which we probably couldn't understand anyway (my numerical methods professor's words). The school required EE's to take 2 semesters of numerical methods so we would at least get a feel for what a computer would do. Great, prepare me for the real world with ALGOL 60 programming on a Univac 1104 mainframe! Even back then listing ALGOL experience on a resume would bring a chuckle from the interviewer. They only taught advanced programming like FORTRAN 66 and COBOL to EE's silly enough to think computers were important. We had to buy a box of punch cards and time on the computer. We got 3 minutes for $10--very expensive . Professors and senior grad students could use the tube room terminals, but us lowly undergraduates had to stand in line to submit jobs at the card reader. We paired up to do class assignments. Piotr and I teamed up. Piotr was a real nice guy, but dumb as a post (last I heard he was a taxi driver in Cleveland). We decided that I would write the programs and he would: 1) stand in line waiting for the punching machine, 2) punch the cards, 3) stand in line to submit the cards at the card reader, 4) submit the cards, 5) stand in line waiting for the job to print on the line printer, and 6) retrieve the print out so I could fix the errors and he could do this all again (several times). I thought this division of labor was a good deal. We spent hours refining the programs (usually about 30 cards or so--toy programs really). Several times after days of looking at the program errors we found out that certain punch machines were out of alignment so even if the program was correct and the holes in the card looked OK, the card reader wouldn't read them correctly. All this confirmed my suspicion that computers would never catch on and that I didn't want to have anything to do with them. I went off to build hardware for the US Government. Well darn if these computer thingies didn't become important. I bought a Heathkit H89 in 1979 and taught myself Z80 assembly, BASIC, and FORTRAN on it. You haven't lived until you compile a FORTRAN program on a 2 MHz machine with 100 KB floppies of which 24 KB was Heath DOS. The world changed some more. The last 10 years of my career I spent doing computer and network security. I'm really glad I had those ALGOL courses :-)
23) Message boards : Number crunching : Daily quotas (Message 6707) Posted 18 Dec 2005 by Purple Rabbit Post: Returning valid results will cause the quota to rise. Do not reset. This is not necessary and won't change the quota. If I remember right the quota goes down by one for an invalid result and up by 2 for a valid one. It will fix itself in a couple of days if the computer is working correctly.
24) Message boards : Number crunching : Approximate RAC question. (Message 6693) Posted 18 Dec 2005 by Purple Rabbit Post: Upon consideration, I guess the question was less to do with RAC, and more about what it would benchmark at. Many thanks to Webmaster Yoda for finding the Housing and Food Services hosts to compare to. How did you do it? I can expect a measured floating point speed in the range of 1050-1100 million ops/s, which clock for clock, is similar to an Athlon XP. I'm happy with that. I'm running a 1.3 GHz Celeron (with an adapter to the Slot 1 interface) on an Intel 440BX2 motherboard with 640MB memory. It benchmarks around 1.2 GFlops for Windows and about 600 MFlops for Linux using the standard client. I use an optimized client for Linux that brings the benchmark back to 1.2 GFlops. I would have replied earlier, but the discussion went off on RAC. I didn't see any way to give a meaningful reply about RAC since Rosetta has a 32.2% share of 4 projects running on this computer. An "eyeball" average Rosetta WU completion time (CPU time) is about 4 hours, but it varies from 1 to 7 hours depending upon the WU.
25) Message boards : Number crunching : So is it cheating or not? (Message 3442) Posted 16 Nov 2005 by Purple Rabbit Post: A level playing field would be nice, but since when has this ever been the case with BOINC? I think those individuals with LINUX and sometimes MAC boxes would have liked to have fairness from day one. The simple truth (as Bill noted below) is that the benchmarking for credit idea is the problem, and a level field will never occur until the crediting system is changed! I'll offer an example for Linux vs Windows vs "Optimized BOINC". My P3 1.3 GHz Celeron was running BOINC under Windows XP. It benchmarked at 1.3 GFlops FPU. I recently converted it to SuSE 10.0 (Linux). The benchmark is 612 MFlops. An optimized BOINC for Linux restores that to 1.3 GFlops. I think that's a fair use of an optimized BOINC client. Yes, the benchmarking process is flawed, but to say there is no reason to run an optimized BOINC client is incorrect. It's a useful workaround until the credit process is overhauled.
26) Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : Graphics (Message 3350) Posted 16 Nov 2005 by Purple Rabbit Post: I just got the rosetta_graphics_beta 4.79 application with a WU. It looks good and seems to work well. I saw little decrease in the calculation speed while I ran it. Of course I only ran it a few minutes, twice. I didn't want to press my luck :-) An addendum: My machine is new. It's a 3.4GHz P4 with 1GB memory and a GeForce 6800-Ultra on a PCI-E bus. Other machines may have different results, but mine worked great. Send me another one!
27) Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : Graphics (Message 3299) Posted 15 Nov 2005 by Purple Rabbit Post: Oh, Purple Rabbit, you are so lucky! :-) Us wabbits love pretty pictures :-) I'm glad I won the WU lottery and was alert enough to watch it for a bit while it was on my computer. It's gone now...sigh...no more pretty pictures. Time for a carrot break.
28) Message boards : Rosetta@home Science : Graphics (Message 3247) Posted 15 Nov 2005 by Purple Rabbit Post: I just got the rosetta_graphics_beta 4.79 application with a WU. It looks good and seems to work well. I saw little decrease in the calculation speed while I ran it. Of course I only ran it a few minutes, twice. I didn't want to press my luck :-)

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