In article <48a036d4@news2.actrix.gen.nz>,
~misfit~ <misfit61nz@hooya.com.au> wrote:

Somewhere on teh intarweb "Patrick Vervoorn" typed:

[selective snippage]

Good idea, I'll do the same, where applicable of course. ;)

Hey Shaun,

Good to 'see' you mate.

Yo. ;)

Astropulse WUs are prefixed by "ap_", have lots longer file names
and have run times listed that are approximately 5 x that of
'normal' WUs. Also, under the "Application" column in Task Manager
it shows Astropulse 3.45 instead of SETI@home Enhanced 5.27.
(Astroplulse 3.45.exe is downloaded when you get the first
Astropulse WU.)

Aha, haven't spotted anything like that, even on machines which are
clearly capable of processing these WUs.

It seems that they've only been rolled out in the last couple weeks.

And it seems they only end up on machines which have an 
unchanged/non-existing app_info.xml, or a modified app_info.xml.

Checked my machines, and a P3-700MHz, 512MB Linux machine of mine, for 
which I haven't found any optimized binaries, has one queued up, expected 
run-time: ~205 hours. Weird, since I don't meet the 1.6GHz requirement, 
but we'll see how this turns out.

Nope, I don't see anything either. Also nothing from the site I
downloaded these optimized binaries from (the 'lunatics' site from
the third-party list).

I didn't realise how new Astropulse is, seems I came back to SETI just as 
they introduced it.

It's something from the last few weeks or so, although there have 
apparently been rumblings about it for much, much longer.

I have programs and data mixed. ;)

I'm a neat freak. (I prefer 'optimised' really.) I have multiple HDDs in my 
main machine so like to split I/O between disks but even in my PCs that have 
a single disk I have seperate partitions for OS, programmes and data. I find 
that systems run faster like that and it's easier to keep fragmentation to a 
minimum.

I did that, even partitioned disks in a primary C: for the OS, a D: for 
Programs and an E: for data, but as time went on, I noticed I was running 
out of space on all of them, so nowadays I stick to a somewhat larger C: 
(25GB for XP/Vista32 seems to be fine, Vista64 needs a bit more, so I set 
that at 50GB), and the rest of the disk as one big D:

I'll probably backup the directory, and just try it on one of my
slower Windows-based machines to see what happens. I must say I find
this change in the installer a bit confusing at best; a notice about
the current location of the data, and perhaps explicitly having it
mention that data will or will not be moved, would've been nice...

It seems that Tazz has experience with this so it might be a good idea to 
flush your cache first. Perhaps now? While the servers are down your cache 
might be empty? I'm just glad that I have a couple Astropulse WUs queued 
(last one processing now) so that I had work during this server outage. In a 
couple hours my cores are going to go into rest mode.

Well, I've set my preferences to 5+5 days of work, so all machines are 
still crunching on, and aren't even halfway past their cache.

Also I think BOINC re-downloads any missing WUs when you, for instance, 
wipe the directory. My 'plan' (still not done, since I noticed they 
juggled the versions around a bit: one day they offer 6.2.14, then 5.10.45 
again, and now they are again offering 6.2.15 as the new BOINC versions) 
is to backup the directory, then install the new BOINC and monitor the 
stuff. Also, perhaps the 6.2.15 windows installer works differently from 
the previous 6.2.14 (beta) which was, so it seems, mistakenly launched as 
a final....

I also ran a 6.3.6 beta client for a while, and one of the most 
interesting messages that spat out during startup was the line "No CUDA 
devices found". I suppose it would be very neat if I could use my 8800GTX 
as a Seti@Home cruncher, but no client is in sight AFAIK. Darn.

Ciao, Patrick.