1) Message boards : Number crunching : Because you asked.... (Message 16866)
Posted 12 May 2007 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
Hello...
The transition is progressing. Hope to have some more concrete information on the front page soon.
The project has been through a number of admin's hands and so information has been spread thinly. Thinks have taken time as I have had to scrape the information together and when I find something out it solves 1 problem but reveals 2 more...
I know a number of you are feeling frustrated about this... if it is any comfort so am I!!!
Bye for now
Alex Owen
LHC@Home Server Admin


If you just post this or something like this every 4 weeks or so on the front page it would satisfy a lot of people like me. Even if there is no progress, we will understand.
2) Message boards : Cafe LHC : news from orbit@home (Message 10038)
Posted 10 Sep 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
<blockquote>
Will there be a Windows version available then? If so, will I be able to sign up in advance for that, either beta testing client or full application?
regards
Robert
</blockquote>

They did post this.
"Posted 9 Sep 2005 21:51:27 UTC
Last modified: 9 Sep 2005 21:53:48 UTC

Of course, many users here are wondering when a windows client will be available, so it might be useful to better explain the present situation.

From my point of view, it doesn't really matter on what platform the application is running. In general, a very good agreement between results from different platforms will be achieved. But, since I work and develop using a Linux machine, now I'm providing the client for Linux only. This because it takes to me only minutes (really!) from the source code modification to the release of the new version of application on o@h. At this point in the development, I'm settin up all the BOINC processes so that it can run smoothly, and at the same time I'm extending the scientific application. It would not help now to have many different clients for different platforms, because the problems I'm solving now can be spotted easily using one platform only, and providing more clients would only slow down this process at this time.

Also, even considered I haven't tried yet to compile under Windows, I'm sure that it's not going to take weeks to get something running, but hopefully only a few days of work. So when I'll be satisfied with the application itself, I'll start to compile clients for other platforms. And keep in mind that the whole project is open-source, so people is allowed to download the source and compile it for any platform. I'm not providing the source yet, since it's changing so fast, but interested users can ask it and I'll send it to them, with only very limited support and no documentation at this time.

So please be patient, and remember: this could also be a good reason to try Linux! As the knoppix website says: from zero to Linux in 5 minutes..."
3) Message boards : Number crunching : New Version of Boinc (Message 9758)
Posted 31 Aug 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
BOINC 5.1.1 can be downloaded at http://boinc.berkeley.edu/download.php?dev=1
4) Message boards : Cafe LHC : SETI transition from classic to BOINC on SETI technical news (Message 9278)
Posted 9 Aug 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
David brings up a valid point on what the relationship between project managers and crunchers should be. I believe it is a bi-lateral relationship.
On the one hand, the projects need crunchers to accomplish their missions. They need feedback on what works and what does not work to be more efficient. I have seen suggestions in the forums incorporated to various projects to make them better. Crunchers care about these projects and support them with our computers and electricity.
Of course, the scientists have the expertise and should lead the project, but they owe the crunchers an occasional update as to the big picture and how things are going so we can all feel a part of the project. That is why all the projects I know of have some type of forum and some type of news on the front page.
On the other hand, users need to realize that projects aren't huge groups of people and resources who exist soley to make them happy as crunchers. Often times there are just a few people (SETI has two paid positions!)who are doing their best with limited resources. I too get tired of some people complaining as if they are losing their house when a project goes off line for a few hours.
Because I believe in a two way communication, I posted my concerns. SETI does not have to respond, of course, but I hope they do communicate a little more in their news or technical news as LHC has done.
Congratulations on 6,255 classic seti work units David! That is truly an awesome amount! I was crunching seti pretty steadily since it opened and I only had 874 wu's. You have really made a major contribution to science!
5) Message boards : Cafe LHC : SETI transition from classic to BOINC on SETI technical news (Message 9234)
Posted 8 Aug 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
A "future directions" on classic "predicts" the following schedule:
"Souther Hemisphere data recording 12-03
Southern Hemisphere Client 01-04
BOINC Astropulse 12-03"
My concern about forever putting off the migration in order to please all is that we are stuck scientifically from moving on. I would rather take the lumps of many complaining, and just close down to get it done rather than being stuck while pursuing the illusive dream of a smooth transition and making everyone happy. After that "bump" we could devote all seti resources to BOINC which will sooner solve problems. Avoiding that bump will just keep us stuck. After classic closes either we will have enough resources or we won't. SETI can deal with it at that time.
Further, I believe the bump will not be that bad. BOINC seti would use less computer time because, though it may be more complex, in BOINC seti you would only crunch a piece of data a minimum number of times instead of crunching repeatedly and unnecessairily just to keep the classic seti crunchers happy.
Classic seti has had plenty of time to get their final crunch on. I would like to see some new direction to seti rather than the same old issues revolving around how we can please both classic and BOINC users. Classic seti was a historic ground breaking endeavor that will go down in history, but it is time to move on. The forums on classic seti should be closed immediately (notice was already given) and e-mail should go out announcing the specific date that classic seti will stop taking downloads and the specific date they will stop taking uploads. Then the project can close and we can move on.
6) Message boards : Cafe LHC : news from orbit@home (Message 9066)
Posted 31 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
> The project sounds absolutely ludicrous. Why would anyone want do a project
> about NEO colliding with Earth? Thats sounds crazy but then again i'll
> probably do it. Going to sign up for it has soon has they open up the account
> creation.
>
They are concerned that we have enough time to do something in case of the very rare but probable event of an NEO hitting us. I am glad they will also be doing other orbital mechanics problems at a lower priority. Whatever helps astronomy...
7) Message boards : Cafe LHC : news from orbit@home (Message 9065)
Posted 31 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
July 28, 2005 Orbit@home news
Today we updated the BOINC code (and database tables) used by orbit@home to the latest development version available. Please report any problem. We are working on a preliminary client, to gain more experience with the BOINC system while still developing a more complete scientific application. The orbit@home team is also starting several scientific collaborations in order to use this distributed computing system to study other celestial mechanics problems. The work-units relative to these projects will be handled at the lowest possible priority, while the Near Earth Objects computations will always be handled with normal to high priority.
8) Message boards : Number crunching : Leave account creation open! (Message 8999)
Posted 28 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
I was in repair division in engineering 1981-1985. Wow! What a small world!
Ed
9) Message boards : Number crunching : Leave account creation open! (Message 8980)
Posted 28 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
Hi Paul, we have a lot in common as we were both sailors in the US Navy!I was on the older aircraft carrier Midway.
If possible, I would rather gather the operators now so they will be ready when we have larger production runs. Orbit@home has over 1,000 operators and they have yet to crunch anything. It is good to be cautious, but constantly opening and closing account creation after everything is stable will not get our numbers up or give us a reputation for reliability. Of course, I don't mean to be a Monday morning quarterback and there probably is a good reason to hold account creation to 10,000. I would like to eventually see this expand, however, to a really major project and keeping account creation open will eventually be one way to expand.
Ed
10) Message boards : Number crunching : Leave account creation open! (Message 8959)
Posted 27 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
Of course LHC knows best, but soon I hope we can leave the account creation open and gradually build up to 20,000 members like predictor. I believe this is the next big step for LHC@home now that we are already producing large work units.
11) Message boards : Number crunching : Higher User Limit (Message 8550)
Posted 15 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
> You are assuming that the "something" out there is aware of our presence and
> is intentionally trying to avoid us. One of the things SETI is looking for is
> a signal similar to what our earth has been broadcasting for the past 50
> years. Signals from TV and radio, and other forms of communication that have
> propogated away as an unintended consequence of our broadcasts.
>
> Jim
>
> >(SETI is fun but I think if they
> > wanted us the pick up their signals, they would have gave us a chance to
> do so
> > already...that is, IF there is "something" out there ;) )
> >
> >
>The SETI Institute is looking for just such random signals, but they only give a short time per sun. If we were on the wrong side of the planet or sun we would not receive the signal. SETI@home looks for a deliberate signal on a specific "waterhole" frequency. I am hoping seti@home expands its search eventually.
12) Message boards : Cafe LHC : news from orbit@home (Message 8354)
Posted 8 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
July 5, 2005
Orbit@home status update: we didn't manage to fix the few website problems still around, and we didn't write the intro page yet. The main reason for this is that we're using all of our very limited resources to try to get orbit@home funded. This first funding wave will end on July 22. After that, a preliminary application and some work units should be available shortly. The subscription phase ended one week after the orbit@home website launch, and for the alpha phase we can count on 1036 users and about 1400 computers, with about [55% Intel, 43% AMD, 2% PPC], [92% Windows, 6% Linux, 2% Darwin] and [78% 1-CPU, 20% 2-CPUs, 2% 4-CPUs or more].
13) Message boards : Number crunching : sugestion for downloading BOINC from LHC website (Message 8353)
Posted 8 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
Thanks! The download page now has BOINC 4.45 and a reference to the SETI download page for future versions. I think that will make your job easier. Thanks too for the new work!
14) Message boards : Cafe LHC : SETI migration news (Message 8342)
Posted 7 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
July 5, 2005 - 20:00 UTC
Somebody on the message boards asked about the status of our database migration. After recovering from the crashes in early June, the process has been slowed by two things: moving the scheduler onto the old database server (thereby reducing the CPU power), and a very long IDL job (for HI data analysis) that was eating up a lot of memory. The IDL job finally finished, and now that the long weekend is beyond us we are ramping the migration processes up as fast as they will go until they compete with the scheduler. It's hard to give an estimate on time of completion as we are going tape by tape, and each tape inserted vastly different amounts of signals in our database.
15) Message boards : Number crunching : sugestion for downloading BOINC from LHC website (Message 8272)
Posted 2 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
Why not refer to the same page as SETI which develops BOINC? That way you will always have the latest version and not have to mess with it. Predictor and Einstein already do this. If there is a problem then the sooner it is known the better. In any case, many of your users will automatically go with the recommended or even experimental version regardless of what you have on your website. Those who want to stay with older versions may do so, of course. The danger is once you open up to many new users you don't want them to wonder if they need to stay with an old BOINC version. Right now your website only lists BOINC 4.19 even though the elsewhere recommended BOINC 4.45 works fine. If your BOINC download page is the seti download page then that won't happen and you never have to worry about updating it.
16) Message boards : Cafe LHC : SETI technical news (Message 8243)
Posted 1 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
June 30, 2005 - 17:00 UTC
Last night the upload/download server ran out of processes. This happened because the load was very heavy, which causes adverse effects in apache. When hourly apache restarts were issued (for log rotation), old processes wouldn't die and new ones would fill the process queue. By this morning we had over 7000 httpd processes on the machine! Apparently some apache tuning is in order.

This went unnoticed, though the lack of server status page updates did get noticed. The page gets updated every 10 minutes (along with all kinds of internal-use BOINC status files). Once every few hours the whole system "skips a turn" due to some funny interaction with cron. But occasionally the whole system stops altogether until somebody comes along and "kicks it" (i.e. removes some stale lock files).

So we noticed the status page was stale, "kicked" the whole system and it started up again (temporarily). Everything looked okay, so we went to bed, only to realize the gravity of the problem in the morning (the system was hanging because it would get stuck trying to talk to hosed server).

There was also a 2-hour lab-wide network outage during all this. Not sure what happened there, but that's out of our hands.
17) Message boards : Cafe LHC : SETI technical news (Message 8242)
Posted 1 Jul 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
30.6.2005 10:29 UTC
We are happy to announce the start of a large production run, with the first set of 27,000 million-turn jobs just submitted. We will soon decide whether to open up to more users. Many thanks for your patience waiting for this good news!
18) Message boards : Cafe LHC : SETI technical news (Message 8222)
Posted 30 Jun 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
June 29, 2005 - 23:00 UTC
Addendum from previous post:

The outage took a bit longer than expected - the database dump had to be restarted twice (we reorganized our backup method a little bit, which required some "debugging"). We did everything we set out to do except the UPS testing, so that will be postponed.

The machine "gates" wasn't working out as a splitter, so we went with "sagan" instead (even though it is still the classic SETI@home data server and therefore quite busy). Every little bit helps. Eventually we added "kosh" as well, as it wasn't doing much at the time.

June 29, 2005 - 19:00 UTC
Since we're in the middle of an outage, why not write up another general update?

The validators are still disabled. The only public effect is a delay in crediting results. No credit should be lost, as it is always granted to results that still exist in the database, and they aren't deleted until they are validated and assimilated. So various queues are building up, but that's about it.

While this is an inconvenience for our users, repairing this program has taken a back seat to higher priority items (that we expected or appeared out of nowhere).

First and foremost, galileo crashed last night. We haven't yet fully diagnosed the cause (as we've been busy keeping to the scheduled outage for mundane but necessary items like database backups, rebooting servers to pick up new automounts, and UPS testing). At this point we think it is a CPU board failure, but the server is back up (and working as a scheduling server, but not much else). That's the bad news.

The good news is that arriving today (just in the nick of time) is a new/used E3500 identical to galileo (graciously donated by Patrick Jeski - thanks Patrick!). It should be arriving at the loading dock as I type this message. So at least we already have replacement parts on site. Whether or not we need these parts remains to be seen, but the extra server definitely creates a warm, fuzzy feeling.

With galileo failing, and other splitter machines buckling under the load of increased demand, we are slowly running out of work to send out. We tried to add the machine "gates," but due its low RAM (and the fact it is still serving a bunch of SETI classic cgi requests) it didn't work very well. We'll try to add more splitter power today after the outage.

One of our main priorities right now is ramping down all the remaining pieces of SETI classic and preparing for the final shutdown. This includes sending out a mass e-mail, converting all the cgi programs to prevent future editing (account updates, team creation, joining, etc.), and buffing up the BOINC servers as best we can before the dam breaks.

As well, the air conditioning in our closet began failing again over the past week. While this time machines didn't get as hot as before, facilities took a long look at the system and determined that there is indeed a gas leak (freon or whatever they use besides freon these days). More gas was added which will last a few weeks until the problem is fixed.
19) Message boards : Cafe LHC : news from orbit@home forum (Message 8176)
Posted 26 Jun 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
To be more precise, I would say that you should start to crunch something by late August, with some sporadic test starting in late July.

The first one will probably be x86 Linux, since we develop on that platform, shortly followed by "32bit Windows", "x86_64 Linux", "Mac OSX".
20) Message boards : Cafe LHC : news from orbit@home (Message 8174)
Posted 25 Jun 2005 by Profile Ed and Harriet Griffith
Post:
You are right, this is unusual. Normally a project starts with a website with at least a description of the project, then get the application, and finally bring BOINC in. Here they are starting with getting BOINC volunteers, then are going to get a description of the project on the website, and finally get the application. Should be interesting!


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