LHC@home

Hello!
Utterly new here (at least, new now that I am paying attention to requirements) and feeling just slightly overwhelmed, but perhaps I am overcomplicating matters. I did attempt to read the FAQ but was having difficulty trying to understand some of the wording. I did, however, successfully get one task started. I call that a win win in my book!

I have virtual box installed - version 5.2.8.

I figured I should attempt this project on one of my most well equipped machines. a Ryzen pro 1700x with an abundance of ram - 64 GB - using Windows 10 professional and plenty of solid state space on the internal drive. Said Ryzen may be replaced with an i7-7700 or 8700, however, but I digress.

I found requirements for ram and disk usage, but I'm not clear on how that equates to CPU usage. E.g. if a task is multithreaded, as this Atlas task I'm currently crunching apparently is, will that increase ram size the more CPUs (or threads/cores) are assigned to that task?

Which tasks are multithreaded and which are one task per thread/core?
I'm noticing that this task has a fairly decent deadline (I think, though I also think it's going to be well above the 4 plus hours ETA). What kind of runtimes can I expect with each task type?

Most of my machines don't have near this amount of ram and one of them does not allow me to enable virtualization in the bios (don't ask).

Any help/tips are very much appreciated. I am probably overthinking this, but I also don't want to crunch for hours/days only to find that I could have done it more efficiently or optimized it.
thanks!

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Download_Old_Builds_5_2

The newest of the older versions is VirtualBox 5.2.32 (released July 16 2019)


You need a much newer version of VB to start with and also d/l the Extension Pack that goes with it.

And in your Boinc Preferences if you want to run Atlas then maybe test it set at Max # jobs - 4
Max # CPUs 2 on the location you have that pc set at (Home,School,or Work)

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Download_Old_Builds_5_2

The newest of the older versions is VirtualBox 5.2.32 (released July 16 2019)


You need a much newer version of VB to start with and also d/l the Extension Pack that goes with it.

And in your Boinc Preferences if you want to run Atlas then maybe test it set at Max # jobs - 4
Max # CPUs 2 on the location you have that pc set at (Home,School,or Work)

Ah okay, thank you. I will do this. I have one linux box - I will follow the instructions to get theory up and running on there later today as well. I have all projects selected since I am not sure what is most prevalent here. Am I to assume everything that uses VB is multithreaded?
I am assuming max CPUs is max cores? So far this machine has completed a few tasks at the default configuration - 8 CPUS - but I think I will limit it as you suggest so I'm not using 100% CPU and the vm has problems.

From what I gather, theory is Linux specific. Anything else to keep in mind on that front - is VB still required for Linux, too? My linux box is completely headless so not sure how to go about grabbing the latest vb and extension pack using ssh as I'm still a Linux newbie...

From what I gather, theory is Linux specific. Anything else to keep in mind on that front - is VB still required for Linux, too?

You can use VB on Linux if you want to but it's not recommended. It works well enough (some say) but it's very inefficient.
LHC@home has 3 native apps for Linux: Theory, Sixtrack and ATLAS. Since they are native they don't require VB (which can be a real PITA sometimes) but the best part is the much more efficient use of memory and other precious system resources.

(BTW... I'm not plugging Linux as a more efficient OS. The same efficiencies could be achieved with native Win apps but unfortunately only Sixtrack has a native Win app, there is no native Theory or ATLAS app for Win. )

My linux box is completely headless so not sure how to go about grabbing the latest vb and extension pack using ssh as I'm still a Linux newbie...

If you can use ssh, cut and paste command lines into a Linux terminal and edit a few config files (as su (superuser)) then you can easily install the 3 Linux native apps following the somewhat tidy procedures given in other threads here. Well worth the effort, imho.

correction:

... then you can easily install the 3 Linux native apps following the somewhat tidy procedures given in other threads here. Well worth the effort, imho.

Actually the server will send your Linux box the native Sixtrack app automatically if Sixtrack is selected in your prefs. To run Linux native Theory and ATLAS follow the somewhat tidy procedures given in other threads here and of course select "native" in project prefs.