Open BSD i386 Seti@HOME Applications

[zvonas]

Hi Urs,

I had to ldd boinc_client and seti app too as well before I could even run it. So everything works fine-I only have to wait for downloading AP workunits
I am going to test the SSE2 APP on my opteron, we will see
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=5108564

Anyway, is there a plan to release optimized app for non-astropulse units - I mean seti@home enhanced? I am using stock app and that is sloooow...
Thanx

[Urs Echternacht]

Hi Urs,

I had to ldd boinc_client and seti app too as well before I could even run it. So everything works fine-I only have to wait for downloading AP workunits
I am going to test the SSE2 APP on my opteron, we will see
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/show_host_detail.php?hostid=5108564

Anyway, is there a plan to release optimized app for non-astropulse units - I mean seti@home enhanced? I am using stock app and that is sloooow...
Thanx

I already tried setiathome enhanced (aka MB), but that needs (a lot) more work before it can be used. For the moment its only opt. AstroPulse 5.06 .

[zvonas]

OK, thank you anyway.
I have just installed AP SSE2 (AMD) v5.06r236 FreeBSD Beta Build, Sep09 on my Opterons.
We will see the results when it downloads first AP units 

[pp]

I'll help out. Just installed the sse3 version and downloaded one AP wu on my FreeBSD router. It's only a 1,6GHz Celeron so first run time estimate is five days... I probably should recompile those fftw libraries with gcc 4.3...

[Urs Echternacht]

I'll help out. Just installed the sse3 version and downloaded one AP wu on my FreeBSD router. It's only a 1,6GHz Celeron so first run time estimate is five days... I probably should recompile those fftw libraries with gcc 4.3...

The most actual fftw-3.2.2 will do. The libfftw3f in usr/local/lib is what is needed.

[pp]

Yes, that was a little interesting actually. My library is called libfftw3f.so.5 so I had to make a symlink to libfftw3f.so.4 which was in the output from ldd. Still the version is 3.2.2 which is the current in Ports.
1st percent finished in 20 minutes and if it scales linearly, which it usually does, it should finish in about 30 hours. That's also a little funny. I run the Linux version on an sse3 capable Athlon64 which i have downclocked from 2,4GHz to 2,0Ghz to keep the fan silent. That CPU needs 52 hours to finish one AP. If the Celeron finish faster, despite it's only 1,6GHz, I'd be pretty surprised... but I have read that the sse3 implementation in the Athlon64s isn't very good but the tests I've seen at least put it on par with sse2. It will be interesting to see when this wu actually finish. Thanks for your excellent work Urs.

[Urs Echternacht]

Yes, that was a little interesting actually. My library is called libfftw3f.so.5 so I had to make a symlink to libfftw3f.so.4 which was in the output from ldd. Still the version is 3.2.2 which is the current in Ports.
1st percent finished in 20 minutes and if it scales linearly, which it usually does, it should finish in about 30 hours. That's also a little funny. I run the Linux version on an sse3 capable Athlon64 which i have downclocked from 2,4GHz to 2,0Ghz to keep the fan silent. That CPU needs 52 hours to finish one AP. If the Celeron finish faster, despite it's only 1,6GHz, I'd be pretty surprised... but I have read that the sse3 implementation in the Athlon64s isn't very good but the tests I've seen at least put it on par with sse2. It will be interesting to see when this wu actually finish. Thanks for your excellent work Urs.

Recalculate your time prediction after 5% or 10% into the wu. That should give you more realistic estimations (from experience with other OSs).

[pp]

35% after 10 hours so 30 hours seems to be a good estimate. I felt brave enought to launch another Astropulse on the second core on the Celeron but was I surprised. 4% in 2,5 hours, estimates more than doubled despite the fact that the OS ran one wu on each core. This might explain why the stock AP app performed so slowly on this computer, 120 hours for one wu. Still don't understand the technical reasons for this though. Anyone else who has tried running only one instance on a multicore CPU and compared the times to running one instance on each core? Guess the small cache in the Celeron might be to blame... will continue using only one core for now.

[Raistmer]

AstroPulse in some parts very hungry for L2 cache. AFAIK Celerons as like Semprons have reduced L2 cache. So they not very suitable for AP.
Aspecially being running 2 copies of it. Project pairing, damn lack of project/app pairing in BOINC....

[pp]

The first AP with the FreeBSD version is still in validation but I notice some peculiarities:

- Claimed credit is only 473. I thought all the new APs were 800 credits?
- Run time is reported as 18 hours but unless something happened during the final phase (while I was sleeping) this wu ran for 30 hours.

stderr can be found here: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/result.php?resultid=1376540593

It says something about "exiting" and "percent blanked".

[Urs Echternacht]

The first AP with the FreeBSD version is still in validation but I notice some peculiarities:

- Claimed credit is only 473. I thought all the new APs were 800 credits?
- Run time is reported as 18 hours but unless something happened during the final phase (while I was sleeping) this wu ran for 30 hours.

stderr can be found here: http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/result.php?resultid=1376540593

It says something about "exiting" and "percent blanked".

Everything looks ok. Just have to wait if it validates. That wu was "noisy" and had found early into the wu already too many pulses. That also was the reason why it went so quick. Normal times will be much longer (2x or more). If you get higher "percent blanked" values that will slow down calculation even more. All ok. 

[pp]

I forgot to check that wu frequently enough and it's now gone from my statistics. The second wu finished in 44 hours and validated correctly though.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/result.php?resultid=1377075649
Two more in queue. I'll report back if they error out.

[Urs Echternacht]

I forgot to check that wu frequently enough and it's now gone from my statistics. The second wu finished in 44 hours and validated correctly though.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/result.php?resultid=1377075649
Two more in queue. I'll report back if they error out.

Will have a look when Seti is back on the net. Thanks pp

[sunu]

A bit off topic 

How big is a standard freebsd installation?

[Urs Echternacht]

A bit off topic 

How big is a standard freebsd installation?

Depends on what you want to do 600MiB+ will work. But that is rather low. The interesting stuff (ports collection) starts with an extra 400MiB+.

My guess is with 10GiB or more you will have enough space to live on FreeBSD.

Hope that helps.