What is the deal with Mac support on this project?
On the application list, there are mac applicatoins that listed ( https://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/apps.php )
Yes I have multiple Macs running BOINC and none of them have gotten a WU from this project in years. And there are plenty of WU's available right now ( )
Also of note, this forum only has "platform specific" subforums for Windows and Unix/Linux. While macOS is technical a unix, it's not usually listed in that category.

So is macos really supported by this project? Or has support been dropped but nobody updated the site to reflect that?

Oh it also shows Mac support within the BOINC client.

Hi John,

Actually we are preparing a few new macOS applications wich I hope will be released very soon.

What is the deal with Mac support on this project?

Mac or to be exact Apple does not give any kind of support to the Asteroids@home. In the opposite the project supports macOS hosts with some of the available applications.

Yes I have multiple Macs running BOINC and none of them have gotten a WU from this project in years

This sounds like you have some kind of issue either with your BOINC client or else. There are still many contributors which macOS hosts constantly running WU for the project. You can check some of the available stats.

Also of note, this forum only has "platform specific" subforums for Windows and Unix/Linux. While macOS is technical a unix, it's not usually listed in that category.

True, but this is what BOINC project provides to us out of the box. In order additional Discussion to be added to the "Platform-specific problems" Topic needs additional work on the very project core, wich developed by BOINC's developers and is not in our major scope.

Georgi

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“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.” ― Neil deGrasse Tyson

Yes I have multiple Macs running BOINC and none of them have gotten a WU from this project in years

This sounds like you have some kind of issue either with your BOINC client or else. There are still many contributors which macOS hosts constantly running WU for the project. You can check some of the available stats.

What kind of issues? How can I check? What should I check for? I have several machines on a variety of macos versions and none will ever download an asteroids WU and haven't for years now.

Well I have no idea how that happened but mystery solved I guess. In project preferences, the checkbox for CPU work units was unchecked!

I'm glad you have solved that.
Other wise there were so many things that you could need to try, check and test.

Don't forget you have 4 different profiles, like Default, Home, School & Work too.

Good luck,
Georgi

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“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.” ― Neil deGrasse Tyson

Hi georgi
Great to hear new Mac clients are coming, because now I get the known max_points =1000 error sometimes. I hope this error will disappear.
Are you going to support ARM macs with M-processor as well or will it be x86 only?

Thanks

Sjmielh

I'm going to answer my own question :-) Solving questions by doing I like it ;-) Mac with ARM processor are supported!

Thanks Georgi!

Hi Sjmielh,

Updated versions of the macOS applications has already been released several days ago.
There is an arm64 native application as well which you can give it a try, but it will be slow as it does not utilize NEON SIMDs. So you may want to stick with the Rosetta and x86_64-apple-darwin platform.

Best,
Georgi

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“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.” ― Neil deGrasse Tyson

Hi Georgi,

Thanks for the information. I noticed as well that the X86_64 version is faster than the ARM version.

I checked there is information how to convert to better ARM support, for example https://developer.apple.com/documentation/kernel/1387446-sysctlbyname/determining_instruction_set_characteristics or https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252073619?sortBy=best

But unfortunaly I can't help with that, maybe someone else could

Sjmielh

Hi Sjmielh,

As I said we're aware of the fact that the arm64 application is slower. The reason to have it is to provide a fallback option. As to converting a x86_64 SIMD optimized application to an arm64 NEON optimized one the process is not that simple. We have the knowledge how to develop such application. The problem is the time needed to make that happen.

Best,
Georgi

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“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.” ― Neil deGrasse Tyson

the new arm64 native application now utilizes asimd instruction set, so it should be more close and likely faster than the emulated x86_64 version.