LHC@home

Dear Sirs.

I kindly ask you to remove completely from the LHC@home project a non-optimized application SixTrack for 32 bit systems: https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/apps.php

Look at the page: https://lhcathome.cern.ch/lhcathome/apps.php where an unoptimized 32 bit application SixTrack produces 1822 GigaFLOPS, when the optimized ones for avx / sse2 just 341 / 415 GigaFLOPS an average.

That is, in fact, that turns out that all users of 32 bit systems are crunching for 6 hours with an unoptimized application. In case you remove it, all users will begin to crunch at avx/sse2-optimized applications in just 2 hours.

In other words, huge opportunities are being lost doing it.

Or maybe is there any explanation to this?

I would say just remove non-optimized apps altogether... On my Ryzen 3 that's perfectly capable of doing avx, I still get lots of non-optimized WUs, which takes 50-100% longer to finish for same credit. (I am using credit/hr as an approximation as efficiency since it's same app. Feel free to correct the assumption if that's invalid.) I really doubt there are many system not capable of doing sse2 these days and most should be able to do avx too. It's also interesting that all apps are at least sse2 for Linux and apparently that's not a concern.

I wonder if I could use app_info.xml and force map non-optimized app to the avx application? Would it generate different results failing validation? Have anyone tried that already?

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You may insert the following line in the <options> section of your "cc_config.xml":

<no_alt_platform>1</no_alt_platform>

Then reload the client configuration.

See:
https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Client_configuration

Have you viewed your computer performance details here on the web-site? Click your Host details and select 'Application details'. There is a list of performance figures for all applications run on your Host. The server selects the fastest application (highest Average processing rate) for your Host when it sends you tasks. This isn't very precise method as sixtrack tasks vary a lot in size and runtime. That page shows that there aren't that much difference in application performance (server's opinion) and a bunch of long tasks may change the GFLOP numbers down and server thinks that an other application would be faster and selects that one.

Even if numbers has been stabilized to favor one application, every once in a while server sends tasks to other applications just to check if there has been changes to the Host that would favor another application.

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(what will the world do without my X86 XP Pro after its 16+ years here and trying to make me update the OS to a X64)

We can make a drive for you to get a new PC? I normally migrate my BOINC files so it keeps the same PC ID even though the hardware changed.