Open BSD i386 Seti@HOME Applications

[sunu]

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.

I'm planning to build a cheap (about 160-170€) system in about a month used in full experimental/testing mode and of course full-time lunatics tester since I have neglected lately my "alpha tester" duties here. I have an old 36GB raptor that I'm planning to use and I was going to make 2 partitions for windows xp and sidux (and any other linux distro through livecd), so we're going to have direct windows-linux comparisons. If we're to support freebsd maybe I could make a third partition for freebsd.

[pp]

I have a CLI only install on USB I use for rescue and maintanence. It's fully functional and includes source code and ports. It occupies only 1,7GiB on that USB stick. I don't use FreeBSD with graphics at all so I can't say exactly how much more would be needed for X and a windowmanager but you'll probably need another GiB or so.

[zvonas]

I still could not get AP workunit to download and therefore test the application 

[pp]

If you only want to run AP on that machine you can do it like I do. First create an app_info.xml like below and make sure the binary is also present in the same directory.

Code: [Select]

<app_info>
    <app>
        <name>astropulse_v505</name>
    </app>
    <file_info>
        <name>ap_5.06r236_sse3_x86_64-pc-freebsd</name>
        <executable/>
    </file_info>
    <app_version>
        <app_name>astropulse_v505</app_name>
        <version_num>506</version_num>
        <file_ref>
            <file_name>ap_5.06r236_sse3_x86_64-pc-freebsd</file_name>
            <main_program/>
        </file_ref>
    </app_version>
</app_info>
Then go to your SETI@Home preferences and add a separate preference for "school" assuming you don't use that profile for something else. Make the following adjustments:

Code: [Select]

Run only the selected applications SETI@home Enhanced: no
Astropulse: no
Astropulse v5: no
If no work for selected applications is available, accept work from other applications? yesThe last setting is the important one since that's what enables AP v505. Finally update the location of your FreeBSD computer to "school" and manually update the project once. Boinc should now download your new preferences and AP units should start downloading as soon as they're available.

[pp]

A question for Urs here I guess... and I'm in deep water so bare with me if I completely misunderstand things here.

As I understand it, binutils in FreeBSD is from 2004 and has no knowledge of SSE3 and gcc from the base system can't generate SSE3 code because of this. Since I installed fftw from Ports I therefor assume it doesn't contain SSE3 code. Would your optimized Astropulse benefit from recompiling fftw with a newer version of gcc/binutils or is the speedup accomplished by the Astropulse application alone? Could it be statically linked with an optimized fftw to make things easier for users? There's an ongoing discussion on freebsd-questions@, debating the old toolchain in FreeBSD, and I've been following it for some time now trying to understand it as best as I can and its repercussions on the compiled code.

[Urs Echternacht]

]A question for Urs here I guess

Short answer :

FFTW uses only SSE. Please stay with standard features if you recompile it on your own. See docs contained in their downloadable GNU package (version 3.2.2.1 from fftw.org). No benefit from compiling with SSE3, rather this could break compatibility of AP results with other platforms.

SSE3 code is used only from inside AstroPulse. And gcc 4.2.1 (comes with FreeBSD7.2 64bit) does support building SSE3 code.
Static linkage i tried, but gcc gave me what you got, because of problems beyond. Maybe i should update to a newer version of gcc and make a new build, which will then hopefully go "full speed" and use less shared libs.

[pp]

There's a guide over at freebsd.org: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/custom-gcc/article.html
Doesn't seem too complicated to follow but the risk of creating incompatible results is ofc reason enough to stay away... thanks for the answer. I was just curious and try to learn by picking up bits and pieces here  and there.

[zvonas]

Hi PP, thank you, my Xeon is computing first unit  there are no more units now. I will report further.
Which file in Astropulse contains the line where I can read how much work is already computed?

[pp]

You're welcome. Doesn't your Boinc manager show you how far the wu has progressed? I know the 6.9.x version had some trouble with this but earlier and later versions should work correctly in that respect.

[zvonas]

No, I am running command-line client. In seti@home enhanced there was file named state.sah in slot directory and it contained frac_done line with some number - e.g. 0.4266, = 42.66 %

[pp]

Check  boinc_task_state.xml in the appropriate slots/N/ directory unless it's only created if you run Boinc. Otherwise I don't know.

[zvonas]

There is no such file... neither when running nor when stopped.

[Richard Haselgrove]

There is no such file... neither when running nor when stopped.

You need to be running BOINC v6.10.xx (or possibly v6.8 Facebook) to do it that way.

[zvonas]

I have no choice, there is only one version of BOINC for 64bit freebsd

[Josef W. Segur]

I have no choice, there is only one version of BOINC for 64bit freebsd

Astropulse has a binary checkpoint file (ap_state.dat*) which contains the fraction done in a double, so it's not convenient to check that way.

boinccmd --get_results will list all the tasks, including their fraction done.

Or for versions prior to the boinc_task_state.xml change you can open BOINC's client_state.xml file and check the <fraction_done> fields there.
                                                                             Joe