Posts by ahorek's team
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1)
(Message 8353)
Posted 6 days ago by ahorek's team Post: we have decided to detect available features by the app instead of having multiple apps and relying on what the boinc client reports. Once (hopefully soon) we release a new version, this boinc feature won't be relevant to us anymore. btw Primegrid has used the same technique for a long time. http://www.primegrid.com/forum_thread.php?id=10534 until then, there's still an option to run optimized versions on Windows via anonymous platform (if your hardware supports it). Compared to FMA it's up to 20% faster on Intel and slightly faster on AMD (Zen 4). There are rumors that Zen 5 will improve the AVX512 performance, which might be interesting. |
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(Message 8331)
Posted 27 Mar 2024 by ahorek's team Post: I've tested the alpha 8.0 version and have no issues getting new tasks. Could you double-check if CPU work is enabled in your account manager preferences? Also, the client may not request new work, if your host is busy running other projects. |
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(Message 8323)
Posted 27 Mar 2024 by ahorek's team Post: you can download avx512 apps from https://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/download/period_search_10215_windows_x86_64__avx512_win10.exe https://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/download/period_search_10215_x86_64-pc-linux-gnu__avx512_linux ensure your CPU has avx512 support (like AMD Zen 4, Intel Ice Lake, Intel Sapphire Rapids etc.). |
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(Message 8316)
Posted 25 Mar 2024 by ahorek's team Post: is there anything in the event log? |
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Posted 19 Mar 2024 by ahorek's team Post: Keith's issue was unrelated to the android's app. The new android app still hasn't been released, so the "Number of lc points is greater than POINTS_MAX = 1000" problem is still present. The code is ready, we just need to build it and upload a new release to the server. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the server, so it has to wait for Georgi & Radim once they have time to do it. |
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6)
(Message 8308)
Posted 18 Mar 2024 by ahorek's team Post: Cause I always get SSE3 app and never get AVX/FMA ones. I think my CPU 5700X support these. you're right, the fact that BOINC is stuck with SSE3 and never tries new, more optimized apps (on some hosts) is a bug either with the server configuration or the BOINC server code. however, there are more related issues with this approach. BOINC doesn't reliably report all necessary features on all platforms. Windows is the most important one, but the same issue is on BSD and Macs all of them have their specific way of detecting features, so we have decided to develop a new app that selects the best implementation at runtime instead of relying on what the BOINC client says. It's already in the testing phase. if you have this issue and don't want to wait for the next release, using an anonymous platform as Keith suggested is a workaround to get the best performance. I admit it's inconvenient for users who aren't familiar with it, but please be patient, we're working on a solution :) |
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(Message 8295)
Posted 9 Mar 2024 by ahorek's team Post: I have some news from admins, there was a DOS attack from China's network on the website 1000 to 8000 connections at a time. They took some preventive measures. It's hard to say if there's any connection with the Challenge though, it could be just a coincidence. |
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8)
(Message 8292)
Posted 9 Mar 2024 by ahorek's team Post: sorry for the trouble, the server should easily handle +200 (/4500) more users during the challenge. Perhaps the webserver ran out of free connections or more likely someone's deliberately hitting it too hard (by downloading an insane amount of work, crawling the website etc.). Unfortunately, only the university has access to the firewall & logs and it may take some time for them to investigate what exactly has happened especially during a weekend. They're aware of the issue, but I don't know more yet. |
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(Message 8262)
Posted 7 Feb 2024 by ahorek's team Post: sometimes the queue gets dry and it takes a day until admins fill it up again. you can monitor available work here https://grafana.kiska.pw/d/boinc/boinc?orgId=1&var-project=Asteroids@Home&from=now-30d&to=now |
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10)
Posted 29 Jan 2024 by ahorek's team Post: yes, it's most likely 2 issues: 1. scheduling problem - we have no control over task scheduling. It doesn't seem to be related to this project, rather than to Boinc (client) itself. Please discuss the issue on their github https://github.com/BOINC/boinc/issues/5402 2. POINTS_MAX - we're aware of this issue. Android's app is outdated and it can't handle some types of tasks anymore. We are in the process of recompiling old apps with the recent code and the android app seems to be the last one... we'll fix it eventually, but it may take some time, please be patient :) |
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(Message 8245)
Posted 28 Jan 2024 by ahorek's team Post: Bitdefender no longer detects it as malicious software, so I guess, they've fixed it. Note that our binary is still the same :) |
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12)
(Message 8236)
Posted 23 Jan 2024 by ahorek's team Post: Hello gentleman74, the current rpi version is compiled with march=armv8-a +simd option - is already enabled by default, see https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/AArch64-Options.html +crc - these instructions aren't used by the app, so enabling this option will have no effect unlike x86 apps, we don't have handwritten optimizations for ARMs, so NEON optimizations depend on the compiler's auto vectorization capabilities. unfortunately playing with these compiler flags without code changes and manual optimizations won't make a difference. It's not that easy, but if you're interested in development I can give you a link to the recent source code (PM me). |
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(Message 8224)
Posted 19 Jan 2024 by ahorek's team Post: Hi, the app has some driver issues on slow cards, especially on the Radeon R5 family + Windows we will try to fix it in the code, but for now, disabling TDR protection might work https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/tdr-registry-keys anyway, don't expect a good performance. I would estimate ~6 hours for a single work unit. Your CPU doesn't even support AVX, but it's most likely a more effective option for this project than utilizing a GPU. |
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(Message 8197)
Posted 13 Jan 2024 by ahorek's team Post: are you running 20/30 gpu tasks in parallel? that's not a good idea and it won't be any better. perhaps try with recent drivers? 516.94 is a bit older https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/216860/en-us/ |
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Posted 27 Nov 2023 by ahorek's team Post: you can test each application individually https://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/download/period_search_10214_windows_x86_64__sse3_win10.exe https://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/download/period_search_10213_windows_x86_64__avx_win10.exe https://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/download/period_search_10213_windows_x86_64__fma_win10.exe download a sample workunit, rename it to "period_search_in" and place it in the same folder. Then you can reliably compare runtimes for each version. results may vary based on the CPU you have, there are also other things to consider - power consumption, running multiple WUs, operating system etc. usually, AVX/FMA apps have similar performance. Some server Xeons have better FMA performance so they may run faster with FMA. On the other hand, even if Bulldozer/Piledriver support superior AVX, it's actually slower than SSE3. to give you a rough idea about general performance, here are (single thread) results on some architectures I have 
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16)
(Message 8116)
Posted 18 Oct 2023 by ahorek's team Post: https://asteroidsathome.net/boinc/download/period_search_10214_windows_x86_64__sse2_win10.exe https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/41b0472160ebb829dc70a3513bb541daa4a08fb0535bcf943f438adbe98c4855?nocache=1 11/72 AV suites flag it as potentially suspicious, but BitDefender is known for high false positives. Boinc apps are CPU-intensive (on purpose) which could be one reason why they can look suspicious. If you want to be 100% sure, try reporting it https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/29358/ |
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(Message 8098)
Posted 5 Oct 2023 by ahorek's team Post: a new opencl version has been released today that should address the hanging issue. Could you test it and give us feedback? Thanks! |
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(Message 8056)
Posted 20 Sep 2023 by ahorek's team Post: The current app uses hand-written optimized code for AVX & FMA. Unfortunately, there are no major advantages AVX2 can provide for this specific algorithm in comparison to AVX. Simply enabling AVX2 in the compiler won't give any speedup. AVX512 could have some features to potentially squeeze more performance on processors that support it, but the code has to be written specifically for this instruction set. |
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(Message 8044)
Posted 19 Sep 2023 by ahorek's team Post: the AMD bundle includes drivers for many cards, but the exact opencl/display driver version always depends on your specific card. Unfortunately, you can't upgrade it separately. |
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(Message 8041)
Posted 19 Sep 2023 by ahorek's team Post: yeah, it's misleading... 22.6.1 (year, month, revision) is the main driver version. OpenCL device C version: OpenCL C 1.2 | OpenCL 1.2 AMD-APP (3240.7) and one of many parts of the bundle with different versioning is an OpenCL driver - this is the second number. I have the same legacy drivers (22.6.1), but my OpenCL drivers are for some reason more recent than yours. It's the same architecture... weird. |
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