It sounds like a dual core to me, I have one dual core system, and it crunches two at a time. Also, that price sounds about right for a lower end dual core (at that time, they are cheaper now, I paid $900 for my dual core laptop in October) As far as I know a dual core is a dual core regardless, there may be differences in whether or not they share other resources, but it would still be a dual core in that it can run two threads at the same time.

Thanks for the message about SETI, I haven't looked at their news in a while, and my thanks to Sun as well.

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He may have been thinking of a 'dual processor' MB, I think they are quite expensive.

I think the SETI team should have been allowed to 'rip the guts' out of the chess board guys' sys to get theirs up.

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Hi Pinemarten,

Welcome to Boinc & the team!

Yeah there are (at least!!) two types of Intel dual core. I'm pretty sure you a hyper-threaded processor, rather than one with two separate cores. But it still acts like it has two cores, and BOINC will process two work units at once; in Task manager, the two science applications that are running will each show as using about 48%, if you have no other intensive activities in progress. (The science apps are what do the crunching, not the boinc.exe and boincmgr.exe programs; the science apps will have long names in Task Manager, like the Einstein one is now 'einstein_S5R2_4.xx_....'.

If processing two WUs at once causes overheating, there is a Boinc manager Preference to throttle the CPU back, say to 90%. On the same page, you can limit the number of 'cores' that Boinc uses, in your case to 1. (Again, your HT machine is seen by Boinc as having 2 cores, even though it doesn't ) This shouldn't be necessary though, as Boinc is designed to run at 100% in each core, but at low priority, so that there will be almost no noticible interference with your other work.

As far as projects go, the beauty of Boinc is that there are so many types to choose from, and you are free to run what you please, at whatever share you like (although differing deadlines and WU lengths can sometimes constrain this a bit.)

That said...

Math is almost universally regarded as abstract and impractical, and when I studied math, most of us regarded 'number theory' as especially abstract and impractical. I mean, if math majors see something as unconnected with the real world, it must be doubly so!

Of course, now the study of factoring primes (an essential subject matter of number theory) is at the very heart of cryptography. The formulas which tell you how long a given encryption scheme will take to break using brute force are exactly the kind of number theory topics which put me to sleep. Etc.

All a long way of saying: you can never tell with mathematics what will turn out to be useful eventually,

As far as chess360 goes, again, no one makes you run it, and if others want to, why not? I mean, computer games take huge numbers processing cycles away from the 'approved' science apps, so should we make Grand Theft Auto a crime to play if you've installed Boinc?

I'm guess I'm being pretty thin-skinned to take your point about taxing chess literally, my apologies...

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Ah, my mistake, my AMD elitism shows.

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I was kidding about penalizing 'fluff' projects.
One friend of mine thinks the prime number one is a CIA plot to get users to make better codes for them. I think they already have primes large enough for most practical purposes, and I can't see any of the other projects assisting in 'warp drive' or a GUT.

Temperature I should worry about, but I don't. I rarely clean my sys fans, and my speed and temperature alarms are only active at boot-up. It gives me an excuse to buy new ones every year or so when they blow up.

The deadlines are a new thing. Do they only give us so much time to crunch a WU before they give it to another sys?

Can I run SETI on one CPU thread and Rosetta one the other? I think I will stick with two projects max.

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I would also like to see everyone do the more serious project such as illnesses and other sciences, but i still wouldn't ban it in any ways. Furthermore, i think collages, universities and maybe some other schools should all install BOINC. Imagine how much we would get crunched. And we could have a central control of the projects running to ensure it would work on illnesses and physics and such. Unfortunately, i don't think this will ever happen, but i hope the BOINC team would give it a try, at least make it a standard for the entire Berkley University...

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Deadline is the far right column in Tasks tab, and yeah if a WU is not finished by deadline (on most projects) it is sent to another, and you get no credit. Assuming you have an always-on connection, and crunch 24/7, the scheduler is usually smart enough to ensure that you don't DL more work than you can finish in time, but the algorithm is very complex, so you should watch for a few days to see if any are in trouble.

Partly because the scheduler may have to run 2 WUs from a single project in order to honor your resource share, or occasionally to avoid missing a deadline, you can't pin a project to a specific core/thread (with stock BOINC client). For example if your share is 80% Seti and 20% Rosetta, you would see 2 seti WUs crunching most of the time.

And I did think you were prolly joking about the math projects -- sorry if I didn't make that clear, or came off hostile.

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"If a sense of humour doesn't get you in trouble, it is not a very good sense of humour" - Pinemarten
I stopped adding after my sarcastic posts just to get even more people choked.

SETI is back up but no one read my post about 'suspending' it until the new $24,000 server catches up. Some are cluing in.

If they had read the response to my post:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum...ap=true#563974

They wouldn't have all these problems:
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum...d=39394#566888

One guy was choked that nobody emailed him. The response was that the last 'mass email' to over 100,000 clients took around 2 weeks to set up.

I hope they don't overload and wreck the new server. They seem really anxious to get more WUs. To me they sound like a bunch of addicts that need a fix.

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'Then hire somebody that can change them!'
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Our MIS department has, in its infinite wisdom, disabled all screen savers throughout the company. Now the default, and only choice is, the 'text scroll'. So, no more rotating celestial sphere to look at while BOINC-Einstein is crunching numbers.

At least they still allow idle CPU time to be used to crunch WU's, for now...

.

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Somebody has to fight the mighty tyrants that profit by stepping on the skulls of the oppressed masses!

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I find it very hard to complete Einstein in time now we're reached S5R2. I used to have an average of 80, but it has now dropped since i've not gained on some that reached the deadline. 80 in average is quite good comparing yourself to others, but if i still sometimes don't make it in time there is definately something wrong with either the lenght of the WU or the deadline. I don't think the deadline has changed since S5R1, but i use 35 per WU where i used to use only a few hours before. Can we expect this to change, because i've thought about jumping over to a project where i am sure i can make it in time. I don't mind long WUs, but i dislike long WUs in short deadlines It is still a charity job for the scientists and they shouldn't demand us to pay the eletricity bill for a 24/7 job (or let's just say having the projects running while away from the computer).

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Hi Sporally,

Sorry so long to reply; I've been very busy...

Many people are indeed unhappy will the long WU times, judging by the E@H forums.

The reasons for it, AFAIK, are that the previous run was coming to an end, LIGO had a bunch of data that needed processing, and a new app was finished just in time to use on that data -- an app which was more sensitive, and so inherently took longer.

And, since the app was rushed, it did not include the code optimization that had sped up the previous few production apps. These two things combined to make WUs take much longer, particularly on Windows, and most particularly on Windows/AMD, if I understand the posts correctly.

From the point of view of the project, this is not all bad, since the science is getting done: the S5R2 search is now 34% complete.

From the point of view of crunchers, the effects can be bad, as you have seen -- with missed deadlines being one of the worst. We all take pride in returning work on time. And of course slower computers are punished most.

And there are also credit issues, I don't follow the discussions about this too closely, but as best I understand, Einstein@Home was overclaiming in relation to other projects, but the now app has overcompensated, and on some platforms gives less than it should.

As far as deadlines go, I don't understand why they have not been extended: it's an easy code change, I think? I know it means it will take longer for all the results to come in, but would a week's extension affect the final time so much? I don't know the answer.

So to me, it certainly makes sense to stop crunching E@H for a while if you are missing deadlines, or you have to micromanage BOINC to avoid missing them. There are plenty of good projects to try out, which is the beauty of BOINC.

But there is hope! Akos is on the case!!
So if anyone decides to put E@H on hiatus, please check back here when there are new posts, as I'm sure the first person to get the faster app will post...
___

As far as the far, far, future goes, there may be one day a project I've been wishing for: cosmology@home.

At the moment, the project is nothing more than this website. From his postings on the BOINC projects mailing list, it appears the developer has a science app, but is having is having problems BOINCifying it: creating WUs, figuring out the scheduler, validator, and all the machinery it takes to get a project started. (Many projects seem to founder at this stage.)

So it is very much a pre-pre-pre-alpha dreamy vapor-project so far, but if it does happen, and does worthwhile simulations, I for one can't wait to crunch for it.
___
Oh, by the way, congrats to the team for going over 10,000,000 in total credit...

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Seems SETI is having sys problems. Does anyone have any info?

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_status.html

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@Ken Vogt
Yes, a cosmology BOINC project does indeed sound interesting, and most likely i will be running it to when it is running. Together with Einstein with longer deadlines and PlanetQuest and Orbit. Damn many project for the future, though i find many of today's projects to have some downsides. Einstein - dealine, SETI - MIGHT be waste of time, uFluids - lack of WUs, and then some too commercial for me.

But as for einstein@home i think it is very important for the to change the deadline, can't be that difficult as you pointed out. Once we did 1% of the WUs per day. Now we are dropping in work done, most likely because of the short deadlines. I have two PCs. One AMD and one laptop i think is AMD too, but maybe Intel. I don't use my laptop enough for it to do einstein@home WUs, and i use my desktop for playing a other stuff. Playing stops BOINC more or less, and with the rest of the time my comp. is turned on i find it hard to do them in time before the deadline is reached. But i think the guys behind einstein@home should think about how many WUs they loose for not extending the deadline. Some find that they can't do it in time and therefore looks for other projects, and some return the data too late, which is then thrown onto someone elses computer in the hope that they'll make it in time, but maybe they won't and then the final result will take a lot longer than if they changed the deadline. I would say as much as twice as long. I use my computer relatively much for other purposes than playing but barely make it in time. Some people don't have their computer turned on that much and they won't be able to make it in time if it will not be extended for twice as long as it is today. Maybe my problem is more of an AMD problem than it is a computer-turned-on problem.

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Found a way of optimizing crunches. It just replaces some files in the BOINC directory. It seems to have taken my sys from 8-10 hours per WU down to 3-4. Could be faster units though.

http://lunatics.at/

Has anyone else tried it?

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I guess it is quicker by 2.7 times!

The expected results are here:
http://www.zadra.org/seti_enhanced/i...p?page=wincomp

They have many processors benchmarked before and after optimizations.
It was for written SETI, but there should be sites somewhere for the other projects.

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Hi Pinemarten,

These are great results...

I had not heard of this optimization, though there are several for SETI: 'crunch3r' and 'chicken of angnor' are ones I've heard of. (Beware: I haven't run SETI for a while, so my knowledge is very limited.) As you say, versions exist for almost every platform and processor feature list.

Since SETI is open source, this kind of optimization is possible, and even encouraged -- at least tolerated: many threads exist on the SETI boards anyhow. And obviously, a near threefold improvement in speed is not only good for the user, but increases the scientific throughput as well.

Use of such apps does require a bit more hands-on: if I understand right, a new multi-beam SETI app (including astropulse) will be ready "soon," and when it is pushed out, neither it nor the older optimized app will get work unless the project folder is edited. Of course optimized apps will no doubt appear for multi-beam in short order...

Hopefully some other BAUT SETI team members can comment on what runs best for them?

Coupla things:

This is only for the SETI science app, and is not a replacement for the main BOINC application (as you noted in your last post). So-called 'optimized' BOINC clients are unnecessary, since the manager and core client do no crunching. Such optimized clients' (only) purpose is to enable falsely inflated credit claims, and so are cheating, IMO.

I think there ma