Posts by John Eric Hopkinson

1) Message boards : Number crunching : New work Discussion (Message 55648) Posted 6 Feb 2017 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Thank you Les and Dave et al Dont I wish I had the time to catch up on all the complications, and I should have done a search re the code owners etc And my reference to Linux on older machines is for CPDN only, because crunching was slow, but Linux did the work. And Les,the link to forestry etc is very appropriate today because our friends and relatives on the West Coast are suffering some of the worst snowfalls in living memory. I have been lookin for some of CPDN's models which may have seen some of that coming last year. Others did but got very little coverage. I may be a bit offtopic but RaspberryPi has a recent version called PIXEL for laptops and PC's. No power savings there.
2) Message boards : Number crunching : New work Discussion (Message 55636) Posted 2 Feb 2017 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: @Jim1348 and Dave Jackson and Les: My experience with Linux on older machines has been unexciting,and, because of that and a lack of WU's in late November I suspended CPDN and turned my attention from Oxford U to Cambridge where the Computer Lab was busy with development of projects for RaspberryPi (www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi) In January an article appeared in the Foundation magazine MagPi: "Share your Power With BOINC" !! (Tutorial by Rob Zwetsloot, magpi.cc / @TheMagPi) RaspberryPi runs on a Linux Debian or Raspian version, so I loaded up, but got the disappointing Notice From (CPDN) server that "This project doesn't support computers of type arm-unknown-linux-gnueabhf". Disappointing because I have just started receiving some WAH2's on a Windows machine (@ 75 Watts) and was hoping to transfer to Raspberry Pi mini's (@ 5-6 Watts). Q1: Do you experts think that CPDN Oxford (who are also involved in raspi project work) could hack the code to operate on ARM cpu's? ( the ARM will process other BOINCs, including SETI) Q2: Will there be a more constant flow of WU's for both Linux and Win10 ?? John Hopkinson
3) Message boards : Number crunching : stats exsport (Message 55084) Posted 2 Nov 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Hello you guys: I cannot join in this discussion of scripts and exports etc because I have no expertise in these matters. A mere participant, 75 Watts per hour. However, I can tell you that over the seven days which this greedy laptop has been idling, it has used more power than the lighting load of my kitchen, which is the most intensive in the entire residence. Idling waiting for more work units, or even news about when they might arrive or why they do not. Anyway, I must sign off now and will check in later. Stay sane. auf weidersehen
4) Message boards : Number crunching : New region? (Message 54975) Posted 21 Oct 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Iain: These area maps add a reality dimension to the crunching here and thus add an extra dimension to our interest in these studies. Just how CPDN is flinging these wu's out to the participants is another question, because the ones I receive are literally all over the map. So the distribution concentrates on computer availability rather than who is where. Right?
5) Message boards : Number crunching : New work Discussion (Message 54872) Posted 30 Sep 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: @ Art Masson Thanks for the info. The "Brand String " for the cpu on this Dell XPS is" i7-3517U, CPU @ 1.90GHz; now you may understand the comparisons to your setups, but I dont.. The curious thing here is the CPU shown at 1.90 GHz by Intel, but their Monitor shows Max Core Frequency (operational I assume) @2.76 GHz. CPU utilization is very low, 15%-45% variable. So the cpu may respond to the demands of the CPDN programs and jump up as required (ie auto overclocking?) hence the heat, which is never < 67C. If I solve some of this I will pass it on, because your operating characteristics indicate that something is amiss here and I could be more useful to the cause.
6) Message boards : Number crunching : New work Discussion (Message 54859) Posted 28 Sep 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Thank you Iain and Les. This Dell XPS has an i7 core but I am reluctant to monkey around with the workload because of temperature concerns. (Actually I admit that I dont know how to adjust core performance or overclocking.) The Extreme Tuning Utility shows temps of 80-85C and that is mildly alarming. I am more familiar with 60-70C on the older equipment. And according to DELL, the XPS clock speed is 1.90 GHz as a means of temp control. ie slower all around performance but longer life. This machine is dedicated to CPDN so if you guys are not concerned about heat, I will try some adjustments to allow more cores and more work units. There are now 3 waiting to start.
7) Message boards : Number crunching : New work Discussion (Message 54850) Posted 27 Sep 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: I have an afr50 in the"ready to start" status while 3 others are crunching with as much as 2 days to completion. If this is common practice then that adds to the load of idle outstanding work, correct? This does not seem reasonable when there are no wu,s available but other computers are looking for work. Is the afr50 an orphan from some rejected event?
8) Message boards : Number crunching : Project communication failed: attempting access to reference site (Message 54835) Posted 25 Sep 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Les et al: I may have a partial answer from a very recent similar situation in which my computer was shut down by Windows 10, in the wee hours of a morning last week. On a previous occasion, about two weeks prior to the latest incident, Win10 did the same thing, causing the failure of two wu,s, and apoplexy for me. Not understanding how to control Win10 has caused me a lot of grief, however, on the most recent occasion, two of three wu,s restarted, but one hung up in the transfer processor. If I knew how to post photos I would send a copy of a picture showing "restart_sas50_s01z_1991_-1201_rd00.....etc?" It hesitated several times and I forced the restart, and all threee wu,s from that issue are progressing well, except that the one quoted above is retarded, and I am not sure what will happen on completions of its partners. On two previous notifications from WIN10, I have set a scheduled time, or suspended the program during upgrades etc. with no reaction from the tasks. So Les you may be correct in assuming that several factors are involved in failures, and that maybe we need to accomodate ourselves to the idio(t)syncrosies of our masters at M$.
9) Message boards : Number crunching : Download stalled WAH2 (Message 54758) Posted 6 Sep 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Wrong! Desti and his reply to a previous message solves the problem. Daemons.
10) Message boards : Number crunching : Download stalled WAH2 (Message 54757) Posted 6 Sep 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: I do not recall having seen the bin empty before. Dave, yours is the only comment, and one would expect much more. I presume that the proper procedure now would be "No New Tasks", to allow orderly recovery, if one is planned. ?????
11) Questions and Answers : Wish list : SSL Certificate (Message 54605) Posted 2 Aug 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Does BOINC's Virtual Box provide a solution for the lack of SSL certificates? I downloaded BOINC with the recommended VM additive but do not use it.
12) Message boards : climateprediction.net Science : Climate change has made the European Heatwave twice as likely (Message 54366) Posted 22 Jun 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Thanks Les, and to Iain for the links, Given recent events in Oz, California, WesternCanada< Britain and europe etc. I thought that the immediacy of the CPDN results might offer some cannon fodder to fire at the offenders. (who is us,... we have met the enemy, and the enemy is us .........Pogo and AstroWX)
13) Message boards : climateprediction.net Science : Climate change has made the European Heatwave twice as likely (Message 54363) Posted 22 Jun 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: P.S. I AM reading the Technical FAQs, and, "What does the expeiment do?"
14) Message boards : climateprediction.net Science : Climate change has made the European Heatwave twice as likely (Message 54362) Posted 22 Jun 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Hannah Rowlands is no longer Communications Officer, and that is unfortunate, because her last posts were rare evidence indicating some scientific connection between the distributed computing efforts and the actual weather/climatic events with which the computations were associated. I need to follow up on the links which are provided in her post, but I am also asking the boards if there is some method provided by CPDN to determine the outcomes and the practical applications of the individual tasks or their cohort. Do the CPDN results attract wide attention in the climatology "community"?
15) Questions and Answers : Unix/Linux : Running BOINC under WINE (Message 54351) Posted 20 Jun 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Thanks Dave I will upgrade to max RAM (by coincidence, 4gb) and we shall see.
16) Questions and Answers : Unix/Linux : Running BOINC under WINE (Message 54349) Posted 20 Jun 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: I have Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon running BOINC/CPDN after several trials with WINE. Boinc was then downloaded directly to Firefox and installed very quickly, and tasks have been running, or rather, crawling, for about 80 hours. So WINE proved to be a bit complex for this operation. However, I dont think CPDN can get much benefit from task completions which are under the stated target dates, but about 18% of the completion rates seen on a DELL WIN10 machine. There is very little guidance in other pages, and maybe someone could comment. I dont mind dedicating the older machine to CPDN but it needs to be useful work. This effort was part experiment to prove to DELL that Linux will run almost anything on anything that has a decent motherboard.
17) Message boards : Number crunching : wah2_eu25 work units are BIG (Message 54284) Posted 11 Jun 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Les and geophi, two answers, thank you. I have that map saved and the enlarged picture does indeed indicate very large areas assigned to the work units. One region of personal interest is the Pacific Northwest which extends into Canadas west coast. This area is also under study by the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium of University of Victoria,BC: http://www.PacificClimate.org A recent presentation by Dr.Charles Curry at the university : "Does increased resolution alone add value in regional climate model simulations of climate extremes? A multi-scale study over western Canada". Nice stuff, right? No doubt Oxford is aware of PCIC, but I have not seen any reference to CPDN in any of the updates from PCIC. The Australian region is huge, and a layman wonders what can be determined from a mix of so many weather patterns. No doubt the models are subjected to further concentrated studies of actual conditions in smaller sectors and the overlapped zones for confirmations of model predictions. So much to learn, so little time.
18) Message boards : Number crunching : wah2_eu25 work units are BIG (Message 54278) Posted 10 Jun 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Righto mate, thanks. Now, I found a small map a while back which showed all the wah2 regions, but now I dont know where that map is. However, Northeastern North America e.g. Quebec to Newfoundland and out to Greenland was not included. That may be a useful study area because the most recent weather has been absolutely haywire. Who decides what areas are to be studied and how is all this coordinated. This is not clear in the CPDN Home page info etc. I will follow up on Experiments Coming Soon as you recommended. Thanks Les. P.S. Win10 does try to run your life if you let it, and just for relief, I have fired up an old IBM756CSE laptop which has OS2 and WIndows 3.1 loaded. Life was simpler then, but we survived, and spent less time messing with the hardware.
19) Message boards : Number crunching : wah2_eu25 work units are BIG (Message 54275) Posted 9 Jun 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Interesting: First, because I have not seen Iain Inglis for ten years, and second because I have been waiting for downloads after 4 completions for 18 hours, with server stats showing more than 67000 units ready for blastoff. However, I did see in Applications that Windows 10 is not listed. So maybe I have some kind of anomaly here. Hold on, let me look at my Linux rig. Les Bayliss, Can you add anything here?
20) Message boards : Number crunching : wah2_eu25 work units are BIG (Message 54272) Posted 8 Jun 2016 by John Eric Hopkinson Post: Dave and Geophi: The three workunits referenced below will finish in about ten hours. I have set preferences to prevent new downloads because I may be able to improve performance with some adjustments to preferences. However, I dont know how to evaluate the performance. Can you look at these in the log file and provide some guidance. And, will there be more workunits provided for Linux in the near future? Thanks for the help.

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