Automatic test and benchmark package - includes installer (BETA)!

[Simon]

Due to popular demand, I've created a small program that runs each of the optimized science apps and checks whether they work on your system and how long they took.

It then suggests the best one for your system and will automatically install it for you if it can find your BOINC directory (and you click the automatic install button).

Automatic test and benchmark package with installer (includes R-1.3 science applications)

If the package or installer don't work on your system, please tell me about it!

CAUTION: You will have to have the Microsoft .NET framework version 1.1 or later installed to use this application! In most cases, you will have it already.
If not, you can grab it from Microsoft.

Regards,
Simon.

[Kna]

Ooops..

" Missing mscoree.dll in the specified path"
With Win2000 SP4

[Simon]

That would be because you didn't install Microsoft .NET 1.1 - go get it at WindowsUpdate/Microsoft.com

HTH,
Simon.

[Dr.]

Hello Simon :)mi first post here

So this is for people that r not 100% on what their cpu can use(sse,mmx...)

Oh and i wanted to say Thank you for making the app's:)(mi message of thanks had ben moded at set dono why)

[Simon]

Thanks!

Dr., your message got removed because you posted in the announcements thread
That one gets cleaned of anything but messages announcing optimized applications (I did see your message, but then it got deleted).

In any case, yes, the test & benchmark tool right now is mostly for people who do not know what version to grab.

In the future, it will allow you to benchmark various different WUs and directly upload/compare your results to others as well as validate results. Following a hint from Kna, I will take a look at CPU-Z's distribution reglementation and license (because it gives a very detailed report on the hardware installed in your computer which is tough to get otherwise).

That way, I could feed my statistics totally automatically (and reduce the chance of tampering). A person would have to have a pretty high amount of knowledge to fake it (and for those peope, there's usually nothing that will ultimately stop them, anyway).

Up to now, I have manually transferred the stats into HTML pages, which is very very time-consuming and prone to transcription errors.

Regards,
Simon.

[Dr.]

DO'OH that happens

I cant wait to see the new software.
And if you need testers im your man

[Roy]

Simon - first - THANK YOU for all your hard work!  I'm running your apps on my Dell Inspiron 2650 laptp, another Dell desktop (both Windows XP), an AMD box running Linux - but not yet my OLD Pentium II MMX / Linux.

I downloaded your Windows auto-install package, just so I could make sure I'd picked the fastest-for-me clients.  It worked fine on my desktop, but crashes on my laptop.

Immediately after double-clicking Beta tool, I get:
Application has generated an exception that could not be handled.
Process id-0xf6c, Thread id=0x490 (1168)

If I then click 'Cancel' to debug, I'm told that "Registered JIT debugger is not available", so I can't provide any more info.

No files are created/updated in the Test Beta directory.

Any suggestions?

[Simon]

Hm,

did you install the MS .NET 1.1 package on the computer it crashes on? Sounds like it's not finding some parts it needs.

Oh, and the reason why it's trying to call a Java debugger is a mystery to me - most probably, you had or have one installed, and it registered itself as the standard debugger. The executable is Visual Basic / .NET code, not Java.

Thanks for your kind words Hope (re-)installing .NET helps on your second computer. I'm working on a new test application that does a little more, detecs exactly what kind of CPU you're using and automatically shares/uploads your test results. It will still use .NET though, so if this one crashes, I think the other one will too.

Regards,
Simon.

[Roy]

Hmmm, still mystified.  I just fired up add/remove programs, and it says I have .Net 1.1, .Net 1.1 Hotfix, and .Net 2.0

Could the 2.0 be interfering with 1.1?

I'll try re-installing 1.1 and see if it helps.
Update:  searched the web for .Net, and found an MS suggestion for "fixing" a .Net installation.  Downloaded .Net again, and did a reinstall/repair - still get the same crash.

Any suggestions for more debugging?

[Simon]

Not really...

.NET usually just works, and you never have to worry about it - also, 1.1 and 2.0 can coexist on the same machine.

Not sure I can do anything more for you, sorry

Regards,
Simon.

[alphax]

I have to say "Thanks Simon!"

I also want to relay my own experience:  I'm running Win XP Pro SP2

I tried running the test and benchmark tool straight after downloading, but got a "Application failed to initialize properly" error.

After I installed the .NET 1.1 Framework, then it's working perfectly and my AMD64 X2 3800+ can only take up to the SSE2 compile.

[Simon]

That's perfectly normal. AMD chips won't run anything else than the generic MMX/SSE/SSE2 versions.

Regrettably, the test/benchmark tool does not run without .NET 1.1 or higher installed, but you got that fixed it seems

Oh, and thanks!
Simon.

[KarVi]

It's not entirely true that the AMD chips won't run the non-generic executables.

The Intel compiler simply makes them not want to run on AMD chips, as described on this page:

http://www.swallowtail.org/naughty-intel.html

It is possible to patch the executables so they don't look for Intel chips, and the speed improvement is huge, about 10 seconds for every minute of crunching time.

I have it working on my system, currently running the SSE2 P4 version on my Athlon64, the SSE3 P4 version works too, but I don't think its faster, perhaps even a little slower on average. I'm trying to find out more precisely.

[Simon]

Karvi,

I'm aware of that However - as the legal situation is less than clear, I will not offer pre-patched executables (and the ones I released will only run on the CPUs I mentioned unpatched).

Also, I've been made aware that using ICCPatch may give computation errors on non-Intel CPUs - they have more registers, and if you try to address one of those on a CPU that doesn't have it, bad things can happen.

So - classic case of "caveat emptor" (buyer beware) - of course, nobody is stopping you from doing it

Regards,
Simon.

[IrishFBall32]

Simon - The JIT debugger error that was being experienced was not calling a Java debugger... JIT is used as a generic term for any debugger that can be popped up to do forensics when an app dies like that... Windows comes built in with that annoying Dr. Watson 'Send your error log to Microsoft' thing in place of a real debugger, and that will get replaced with whatever comes with VS/VB/Java/Delphi/Whatever language...

I have a nasty contention on my computer because I code in both Java and Delphi (and for a brief while VS before you had a compiler license), and only one gets to be *the* JIT debugger, so I have to manually switch the environment variable depending on what code I happen to be breaking that day 


Also, Kudos for the automatic installer... It makes it far easier to get the best app instead of playing a guess-and-check with CPU-Z.

Any chance you're still looking for testers?

Edit: Oooh, looky, I'm a knave... hopefully and errant one at that