LHC@home

As many of you know LHC@home has been selected to host
the Sprint event of the BOINC Pentathlon organised by
Seti.Germany. Information can be found at
http://www.seti-germany.de/boinc_pentathlon/22_en_Welcome.html
The event starts at midnight and will last for three days.

This is rather exciting for us and will be a real test of
our BOINC server setup at CERN. Although this is the weekend
following Ascension my colleagues are making a big effort to
submit lots of work, and I am seeing a new record number of active WUs
every time I look. The latest number was over 270,000 and the Sprint
has not yet officially started.

We have done our best to be ready without making any last minute changes
and while this should be fun I must confess to being rather worried
about our infrastructure. We shall see.

We still have our problems, for a year now.

I am having great difficulties building new executables since Windows XP
was deprecated and I am now tring to switch to gfortran on Cygwin.
It would seem to be appropriate to use the free compiler on our
volunteer project.

We are seeing too many null/empty result files. While an empty result can
be valid if the initial conditions for tracking are invalid, I am hoping
to treat these results as invalid. These errors are making it extremely
difficult for me to track down the few real validated but wrong results.
I have seen at least one case where a segment violation occurred, a clear
error, but an empty result was returned. The problem does not seem to
be OS or hardware or case dependent.

I am also working on cleaning the database of ancient WUs. We had not
properly deprecated old versions of executables until very recently.

I am currently using boinctest/sixtracktest to try a SixTrack which will return the full results giving more functionality and also allowing a case to be automatically handled as a series of subcases.

Then we must finally get back MacOS executables, AVX support, etc

Still an enormous amount of production is being carried out successfully
thanks to your support.

I shall say no more until we see how it goes for the next three days. Eric.

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Since I'm not participating in the Pentathlon, and I have no interest in its outcome, I'll set NNT until it ends to reduce the load on the server.

The Server says

Yeah Eric it has been a while since I used my XP Pro's here and I updated one to Win7 but they are both 3-core hosts so I just use them to run the vLHC X2 and several Einstein GPU tasks.

I am keeping the one XP Pro running just to see how long it will run but the main reason I updated the one to Win 7 was just to make it a X64 instead of the old X86 just so I can use the extra RAM now instead of less than 4GB.

I have been running the LHC's on the 8-core Win7 lately and mostly getting those short tasks like the......good old days here.

http://lhcathomeclassic.cern.ch/sixtrack/results.php?userid=5472

But since we have some now I will grab another batch and see what happens.

Have a fine weekend

-Samson

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Volunteer Mad Scientist For Life