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Project News - AQUA@home

Started by Cruncher Pete, February 11, 2009, 09:05:42 AM

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BF

From the AQUA news feed:

AQUA@home's minimum CPU requirements

Thursday, 23 July 2009 10:00 AM

AQUA's complex work units have meant extremely long running times, especially on slower systems. This has been a problem for volunteers as well as the project managers. We have been working intensely on improving the efficiency of our applications. One major achievement has been very high CPU utilization on multi-core computers. But this solution will not be of any use on single core CPUs. We appreciate all of our volunteers and their help, but sincerely believe that slower machines can be of much more benefit in BOINC projects with shorter running work units. For this reason AQUA will no longer send work units to single core CPUs. Hyper-threading CPUs are supported, though. Should we again release a CUDA version of our application, single core CPUs will be supported if the system has a CUDA card. Vectorization of our code also implies that SSE2 support is a requirement for running AQUA's applications.

BF

From the AQUA@Home boards:

New Small-Scale Release Out!

Posted 25 Jul 2009 1:58:20 UTC

We've finally got the start of this new release out (and yes, it is 7PM on a Friday here). We've released 20,000 8-qubit problems to the CUDA cards and 20,000 16-qubit problems to the CPUs, so hopfully that keeps people's machines occupied over the weekend.

There were some major snags while releasing, especially with the CUDA release, but they seem to be resolved now. We'll check on the results on Monday to see if we can start on the bigger problems.

That's all for now. Peace out!

BF

AQUA has changed its credit scheme again..

From the AQUA@Home boards:

Posted: 27 Jul 2009 17:01:28 UTC

We changed the exponentially growing scheme (multiplying by 2.8 ) to a polynomial scheme which has less chance of resulting in a credit explosion.

This is the new formula for both the GPU and the CPU:

In a work unit called date-N-SM-L, where N = number of qubits, S = number of sweeps (in millions), L = Number of Trotter slices

credits = N^2 / 6 * S * (L/64)

We also take into account the density of the connections among the qubits, which will change between problem types, so two similarly named work units may get different amounts of credit.

Note that the running time increases at a rate slower than N^2, so we are giving out more credit for bigger problems.

-Kamran

BF

From the AQUA news feed:

AQUA@home invites volunteers with high-performance computers to join the effort


Thursday, 30 July 2009 10:00 AM

AQUA's highly optimized applications use sophisticated methods to get as much performance out of the CPU as possible. We have started a series of massive runs and need help from volunteers with high-performance computers. So if you have a computer with a fast multi-core CPU, please consider helping AQUA by crunching for this project.

Furlozza

#19
So I attach iGnatious.... and ooooooopsssss furgot to change settings LMAO... brb

EDIT: Geeeeeeeesssssssss helps if you have it set to accept CPU and not GPU work units, don't it??

'scuse me, shall just go and  :hbang:

EDIT #2: ah yes, set it up right and it does pay dividends.... without any pending at least at the moment.

Dataman

When I got up this morning AQUA MT is out of work and apparently BOINC Admin is complaining about their "rediculously high credits". AQUA GPU CUDA credits are so low that (in my opinion) not work running. It is not clear if they are going to add more MT wu's today.  :cry2:


kashi

Quote from: Dataman on August 04, 2009, 01:09:07 AM
.....AQUA GPU CUDA credits are so low that (in my opinion) not work running.....

If you want another project to run on your GPU then you could give Collatz Conjecture a whirl if you wish. I don't know how it compares to GPUGrid because I don't have an nVidia card. It would yield about 22K per day on my HD 4890 if I ran it all day, so currently about 20% of what MilkyWay ATI is paying.

I just use it for testing and as a backup when MilkyWay is down. After Slicker, Gipsel/Cluster Physik, Crunch3r and others finish optimising it it should be a nice little earner for both nVidia and ATI owners.

Dataman

Quote from: kashi on August 04, 2009, 02:21:56 AM
Quote from: Dataman on August 04, 2009, 01:09:07 AM
.....AQUA GPU CUDA credits are so low that (in my opinion) not work running.....

If you want another project to run on your GPU then you could give Collatz Conjecture a whirl if you wish. I don't know how it compares to GPUGrid because I don't have an nVidia card. It would yield about 22K per day on my HD 4890 if I ran it all day, so currently about 20% of what MilkyWay ATI is paying.

I just use it for testing and as a backup when MilkyWay is down. After Slicker, Gipsel/Cluster Physik, Crunch3r and others finish optimising it it should be a nice little earner for both nVidia and ATI owners.

Thanks. I'll stay at GPUGrid as they are nice and stable and I don't have to monitor them.


Furlozza

Don't know why BOINC is bitching about Aqua credits. After all, if you want to run it properly, one task makes it all but impossible to run anything else on a quad and one should therefore be compensated for this. Just sounds like sore/sour grapes to me. At least they are open about the way they calculate the credits and have moved with the times.

beakerulz

Guys, i thought i might try run this as I have some 64bit machines with lots of cores. They dont have any Nvidia graphics and ive tried to set it to just use the CPU but I cant seem to download any work units?
Do you need to have a GPU aswell as a CPU? or can I just run some CPU work unit. In the prefferences ive unticked the Use GPU option and ive unticket the AQUA_CUDA workunit. whenever i have the AQUA_CUDA units ticks I get the message that I dont have a Nvidia GPU.

Is the project out of work? DO I have something set wrong? Or do I just have the wrong hardware? Help please

Thanks


Furlozza

I think it has run out of MT CPU tasks at the moment. All that is needed is a 'decent modern' CPU, preferably with Multi Threading, although it does work quite well on Quads. In the preferences section at Aqua, just make sure that you've set prefs to CPU unless you want/have the appropriate graphics card for GPU wus.


Then, just sit back and wait and then watch *grin*

beakerulz

Quote from: Furlozza on August 04, 2009, 09:45:55 AM
I think it has run out of MT CPU tasks at the moment. All that is needed is a 'decent modern' CPU, preferably with Multi Threading, although it does work quite well on Quads. In the preferences section at Aqua, just make sure that you've set prefs to CPU unless you want/have the appropriate graphics card for GPU wus.


Then, just sit back and wait and then watch *grin*

HAHA thanks :P Was waiting for the GRIN then noticed no work coming down! I thought I might have something set wrong but having no work at the mo explains why! I just hope they get some more work soon!! I have some machines ready and waiting!!!!  biggrin

kashi

Quote from: beakerulz on August 04, 2009, 09:36:48 AM
.....whenever i have the AQUA_CUDA units ticks I get the message that I dont have a Nvidia GPU.....

If I remember correctly it always gives that message even when there is CPU work available.

As Furlozza explained there is currently no CPU work. This is because someone had a computer that was misconfigured whether by accident or design and it was returning invalid tasks that were getting marked as valid. So after the last batch was finished they are modifying the next batch so that this can no longer happen. This incident of someone getting massive credits for doing no work was what prompted Boinc Admin to complain about the ridiculously high credits. Well it was the last time he complained about it. Earlier there was a problem with the recently introduced fixed credit system combined with the recent optimised multicore CPU application giving massive credits to everyone running Windows 64 on a multicore computer, especially quads and 8 core computers.

AQUA runs fine on my computer, it uses all 8 cores but only at about 75-85% CPU usage, so it runs relatively cool compared to other projects. The only minor thing that I have to adjust is preventing 2 AQUA tasks running at once. I do this by suspending the second task until the first has completed but in future I will try to adjust the cache size so that only one task is downloaded at a time.

beakerulz

Well I hope I havent missed the boat too much, I have a number of 8 core 64bit Windows machines that im trying to get on this project now....

sounds like i should have been running this awhile ago! I hope they are still paying good credit and I can get some work!  biggrin

kashi

Yes hopefully there will be some more CPU tasks in a while. Your big guns use Windows 64-bit which is the fastest OS for AQUA multicore tasks so should go very well, I know Rocoll and others have been crunching up a storm on AQUA recently. I missed the boat myself on the first bonanza batch of generous credit AQUA CPU tasks but crunched a few days of the last batch.

It wasn't all fun and games for everyone though. Because the applications and calculation method of granting credit has changed a number of times some people got caught with unoptimised tasks that had run for days and only granted very low credit because the credit formula was different when they reported the task to when they received it. Others had a long running task disappear from the database and received no credit at all for it. For many it would have been balanced out by getting high rates of credit on other tasks, but some with only one computer were severely disadvantaged and understandably upset about it.

A lot of this trouble wasn't directly the fault of the project either because they were forced to hurriedly move to a fixed credit structure due to some using GPU emulation software to score gigantic amounts of credit. At the same time AQUA were introducing their newer optimised CPU applications that were much more efficient on multicore computers running Windows 64-bit, which meant the project changed from being well suited to CUDA to being best suited to multicore CPU and poor for CUDA.

This is the nature of alpha projects I suppose, you have to take the good with the bad. On the positive side these kinds of problems such as losing credit due to malfunctions, server crashes and credit calculation formula changes are one of the reasons that alpha projects sometimes have much higher credit rates than established BOINC projects.

The project now allows only 2 tasks at a time on each computer and you have to report one task before you can get another one so that stops people caching very large amounts of work and leaving none for others. This is not well suited for set and forget usage, but sharing the work amongst more participants is fairer and results in a much faster turnaround time for the project. You need at least version 6.x.xx of BOINC to be able to receive AQUA tasks as earlier versions do not support multithreaded tasks. Also single core CPUs cannot use multithreading so are not eligible to receive AQUA tasks.

The large efficiency improvement in some projects due to optimised multicore and GPU applications is making the reduce towards zero credit policy employed by projects such as WCG, Einstein and others look very ill.