Re: Project News

[Dataman]

Ain't it always the way? I put everything on it and the work generator went off line while I slept.  :furious:

[kashi]

I don't mind them running out of work, but I think it is poor form to cancel WUs that are pending. 

News

Already successful results!
Thanks to your help, I'm glad to announce that we have already made some really interesting discoveries! Let me tell you more about it.

The WU's processed at the moment are used to build and find the best model for the prediction of the secondary structure of proteins.
Before using BOINC, this tuning has been realized "by hand" by researchers. The best score was around 78%.
Before opening this project, I ran some beta-tests on a private Boinc project with some members of l'Alliance Francophone. In two days we reached a score of 79%.
During this week, thanks to your help, we reached a surprisingly high score of 86%. Unfortunately, this score is too high to be real. Indeed, it's turns out that we found a bug in the evaluation procedure. We have also discovered some new pathologic cases.

To sum up, by calculating for our project this week, you have helped to:
- Prove the efficiency of the Evolutionary Algorithm used (optimizer), as the mean of the scores keeps increasing every day!
- Find an important bug in the evaluation procedure (calculation of the score) leading to too high scores.
- Find some pathologic cases leading to scores of 100% or 0%.

During the next weeks we are gonna improve our application and correct the bugs.

I'd like to state again that what your are calculating for at the moment is just the first step of our research program and this is why interesting results can be found that fast. We hope to release the complete application as soon as possible.

As we don't like wasting computation time, I turned off the work generator and I'm gonna cancel the WU's still in progress tomorrow. There won't be any work for at least two weeks. After that there will be some batch of WU's released for debug purpose, so please stay tuned.

Thank you for your support! 26 Jan 2011 | 16:27:11 UTC

[Dataman]

I posted a concern in their forum about cancelling wu's. I have 155 PV's and want to make sure they will validate them.

Well, I'm not sure where I am going next. The CPU's are idling and I brought up the GPU's (Einstein finished their maintenance and is back up). As I clean the machines every even numbered month, maybe I wiill get a jump on February and bring the farm down for a bit of a dust out.

:aus1:

[kashi]

Corker Dataman, thanks.

I didn't think of him not realising because of being new to running a project.
I didn't have many pending, it was just the principle that offended.
It was so hot here last night, DNETC was down, MilkyWay still hadn't fixed their database and  CAS was running hot, so I turned the computer off and went to sleep. 

[Dataman]

Thanks. He emailed me to thank me too. He is very interested in keeping the crunchers happy. I just reminded him to also look at things from a crunchers point of view. Nice project ... too bad they will be down for a few weeks.

I had a full day at the farm.  I cleaned all the machines and the racks.  Then I finally finished rebuilding Dataman01 and brought it back up. I had it all finished except for hooking up the PSU and then it sat on the bench for three weeks. The GTX460's are doing EinsteinGPU in 50 minutes, the GTX285 in an hour, the 260's in 1:15. Just for grins I brought up Dataman00 (2-core PentiumD with a 9800GT) and it is happily crunching eOn on two cores and an Einstein on the GPU but it takes 2:15 hours on the 9800GT.  Currently I am just running cards.

[Dataman]

2011-02-08: Evo@home - More information about this project
While you are waiting for new WU's I thought it could be useful to provide you some more information about this project.

An article concerning our research will be presented in two months at a conference. Of course this article cannot be published before the conference but here is a poster presenting the subject: http://www.jul-1.be/download/P02.pdf
Using BOINC and new optimizers, we hope to find even more accurate results!

Concerning the source code of this project, it is now available here. This source code evolves constantly and it is distributed under GNU GPLv3.

New WU's should be available by the end of this month.

[Dataman]

Message 133 - Posted: 10 Mar 2011 | 13:48:27 UTC - in response to Message 132.
Last modified: 10 Mar 2011 | 13:51:20 UTC
Well, it's not really a breaking news, but we are late! I'm really sorry.

Some WU's should be available next week and I hope that the project will be stable and running fine in 10 days.
I'll try to post more detailed news asap to explain you what we are working on and why we are late.

Btw it's really nice to see that you are waiting for work! Thanks a lot for your support.

Again, sorry.

[Dataman]

Evo has wu's. One wu/machine. Uses a lot of memory.
:aus1:

[Mike Mitchell]

Ouch, I'll say! The one on my PC is using 345Meg 

[LawryB]

Yikes!!!  Mine is using 1.223 Gb which is why their website says to set memory preferences carefully.  Should get interesting next week when there will be a lot of WUs and no restrictions.  Got 12 Gb on this quad so I might just test it out.

[Mike Mitchell]

Damn, that's a scary amount of RAM! 

[kashi]

Yeh I'm plugging along doing a few while they are one at a time. If they stay at over 1GB per task I will have to give it a miss when the restriction is lifted. I'm pushing it running one task sometimes, current one is using 1.72GB. Honk, honk, make way for memory hogs!

With 4GB and 6 cores active my computer can't handle 2 such tasks running at once with another 4 cores of Einstein. Setting memory preferences won't help, it would just cause idle cores with "waiting for memory" if it "worked" at all. Not to worry, plenty of other projects with more reasonable ram requirements suitable for my machine. Can see I definitely need a Bulldozer soon with cantidades enormes de memoria.  ;D

[Dataman]

I've run over a hundred on 5 machines with only 2 that blew up at the end. I don't know why but it wasn't memory. I agree with kashi. Most crunchers will not tollerate crunching a project with this amount of RAM usage. Throttling it in BOINC is NOT going to help. I think they should do what WCG did with CEP2 and allow you to choose how many threads to run on a machine.

[kashi]

Yes it's a bit disappointing. I understand they need to use a lot of memory but even some with 8GB could still run into trouble with each task taking 1.5GB and sometimes more. Those with quads and 8GB would probably be OK, but those running 8 cores may need 12GB to avoid strife.

[Dataman]

ALERT!

At least for me, this project is leaking memory like a seive! I had to boot the entire farm this morning.  :furious: This project is going to require a lot of revision before it is ready for prime time.



EDIT: This may be happening only on Win7-64 bit.