RE: UKHA Cancer Update

["Chris Bond" <chris@xxxxxxx>]

Oo useful links :)

-----Original Message-----
From: Ian Lowe [mailto:ian@xxxxxxx] 
Sent: 26 January 2003 6:01 PM
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [ukha_d] UKHA Cancer Update

And in that spirit...

If your gonna do it, do it right :) or, put another way:

Number Crunching Tips for the United Devices Agent.

The GUI wastes CPU cycles. a LOT of them.

If you are on Windows 2000, consider running the agent as a service.
There's no GUI, and you dont get a system tray icon, but you crunch
more
work units.
here's a howto from Team "Crab Cake", one of the highest
returning teams
supporting the project:

http://www.teamcrabcake.org/faqs/faq.htm

As an aside, United Devices weights the number of points you get for
each
Work Unit on the class of your machine (to encourage people to dedicate
faster/better machines to the project, rather than just "my old
box").

Unlike running as a service, this doesn't really help the project goals
any
more (it's effectively neutral) although it will improve your score,
whilst
returning the same number of work units.

If you log into the UD Website, and select "my Device profiles",
change
your
disk allocation to 10Gb. The agent still only uses the same amount of
HDD
space, however, the points weighting on each work unit will increase.

Similarly, adding Network Interfaces will improve your machines rating,
and
the points per work unit, whilst not interfering in the actual work
units
being crunched. If you add the loopback adapter, or a couple of dummy
VPN
interfaces, your score will be boosted.

Number crunching Tips for Seti@Home:

For these guys, a unit is a unit, but the GUI is much more wasteful of
CPU
than the UD agent's is. You should switch to using the command line
client,
which you can get from:

http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/unix.html 
(you need the
i386-winnt-cmdline.exe version)

You will find SetiSpy an amazing little tool for keeping track of your
progress, get it here:

http://pages.tca.net/roelof/setispy/

For some prespective, I switched from Seti GUI to Seti CMD, and my unit
completion time dropped from about 4 hours 20 to my current average
rate
of
2 hours 6 minutes.

Running the seti cmd client as a serice *may* cause issues, and it's
better
to just use Seti-Spy's scheduling options to make sure the client is
running
all the time :)

SMP (both platforms)

Neither Seti@home nor the UD Agent support SMP environments.
In Seti land you can use the extra horses by running two command line
clients, each bound to a specific processor (using Windows NT, 2K or XP
task
manager). Each client needs to be in it's own folder, or they will
interfere. You also need a seperate copy of Seti Spy in each folder.

In UD country, if you are running as a service, you can run two
services,
and change the processor affinity, however, I have not done this (only
used
Seti in an SMP environment personally) so I'm not sure how. a good
google
will help ;)

Hacked clients!!

For both Seti and UD, there are hacked versions of the clients out
there
which simply return units wrongly. In both UD and Seti teams, these
things
are regarded as a complete waste of everyone's effort. Basically, the
short
version is: donwload the client form a recognised site only: if a
website
has a "modified" version of the clients, it won't be helping
the
project.

And that is, after all, the whole point of the exercise.

Ian.


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