Somewhere on teh intarweb "Patrick Vervoorn" typed:

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.

That is odd indeed. ~205 hours huh? Just for the hell of it, when I got my 
first couple, I checked to see what other PCs they were sent out to and the 
others all met the requirements although they were all heaps slower than 
mine. My 'average work done' has suffered since I started getting Astropulse 
units as they're taking a long time to verify. (None has yet..)

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.

Yes. I stopped crunching about 6 months ago for a while as my electricity 
bill is a bit much to manage. However, I have a meter that measures wattage 
consumed in real time and, when it was hooked up to my machine I found that, 
running SETI at a 50% duty cycle, I was only using ~20W more so decided that 
I could afford that for a while. They were talking about Astropulse back 
before my hiatus.

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:

Ok. I have XP Pro on a 5GB partition which it shares with what I class as 
'OS-essential" apps such as AV, Acronis, PerfectDisk, PartitionMagic, 
Spybot... There's still 1GB free after a year on this install. I don't have 
my pagefile in that partition though.

Programmes is 15GB and is nearly full, I might have to increase it a bit 
with PartitionMagic. I have a 2GB FAT32 partition for pagefile only, at the 
start of a fast disk. The balance of those disks are large data partitions 
and the other disks are one big partition also. I find that, as I keep 
multiple backups (Acronis True Image) of the boot partition and sometimes 
the Programmes partition keeping them small is good. (Although Acronis 
truncates the free space anyway so I'm not sure that backups would be *that* 
much larger on bigger partitions with the same amount of data.)

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.

Good move. Mine is 1+1 and I was out of work for a while, then got a couple 
units last night, now am out of work again. :-(

I'm waiting on delivery of a 45nm CPU, an E7300 that should arrive any 
minute. My E4500 has been running at 3.32GHz for a while now, time for a new 
challenge. The E7300 has a 10x multiplier so I'm hoping that it will run on 
a 400MHz FSB (1600 in Intel-speak) for 4GHz at sane vcore and temps. 
<fingers crossed> It's actually quite a big job as my cooler has a 
"bolt-thru" kit fitted which means the mobo has to come out and the case is 
quite cramped with all the HDDs and a full-length GFX card, SCSI card, sound 
card..... Also, I lapped the E4500 which gave me ~6�C cooler temps so I 
might have to fit the E7300 twice. (I don't want to lap it out-of-the-box 
until I'm sure it'll at least work!)

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....

Ok.

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.

Yeah. There's a client for ATI cards no? (I have nVidia too) I can imagine 
that running on both CPU and GPU would bump up the power consumption quite a 
bit!

Cheers,
-- 
Shaun.

DISCLAIMER: If you find a posting or message from me
offensive, inappropriate, or disruptive, please ignore it.
If you don't know how to ignore a posting, complain to
me and I will be only too happy to demonstrate... ;-)