Hi Folks,

After a several year hiatus from BOINC I returned to crunching the other day with with a new multiprocessor computer...

iMac 12,2
Intel Core i7 @ 3.4GHz 16GB RAM
AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB VRAM
OSX 10.6.8

...running...

BOINC Manager 6.12.35 (x86)

...for...

SETI@Home
ClimatePrediction.net

I spent the first couple of days experimenting with the preferences (both online and in BOINC Manager) to see how to get the best (optimal) performance out of this setup.

I quickly found that running either SETI or Climate individually at a "100 resource share" setting (other process not running) worked best. I found that Climate was being a system hog with just 4 WUs on 4 CPUs (slowing things to slow down too much for my liking). So I decided to run SETI (full 8 processors) while I was using the computer during the day and relegated Climate (4 Processors) to the overnight hours.

And this worked fine until this morning when I went to make the "Suspend/Resume" swap between the two processes. The eight (8) suspended processes from last night would not run in the queue and one-by-one began to show "Waiting to run (waiting for GPU memory)" in their Status in BOINC Manager. Then new WUs began to run from the queue but began to have the same problem. So I suspended SETI completely and went to check to make sure all my preferences were as I wanted them...everything seemed fine, so I resumed SETI to complete the queue (No New Tasks) to see if the errant (now) ten (10) WUs would finally run...after a full day of waiting all of the remaining WUs have run without problem and the 10 "(waiting on GPU memory)" WUs are still waiting patiently in line.

I've spent the day looking for posts on this issue, reading the manual, learning about OSX and how GPU cruching is still in the pipe...I've tried playing with settings online and offline, Run based on Preferences, Run Always, Suspend, Resume and...nada.

I've considered "Quiting" BOINC Manager but was concerned that my 4 Climate WUs with over 100 hours invested would get zapped out of existence.

Anyone have any suggestions, work-arounds, chants, etc.? I'd hate to have to abort those WUs!

Thanks in advance! :)
Jimmy G

Hi Dagorath,

Thanks so much for the clues and insights...I do appreciate it! Some commentary and feedback on your points below...

Your climateprediction (CPDN) tasks won't disappear if you shutdown BOINC. Be sure to shutdown BOINC client not just BOINC manager. Click Advanced -> Shutdown Connected Client to do that.

You should make backups of CPDN tasks so that if they crash you can restore them. As you can see they take many hours to run and it's a shame when you get hit by a power outage or whatever and lose a CPDN task after 20 days of time invested in it. The easiest way to backup CPDN is to just copy the entire BOINC folder to BOINC.bkp or whatever but you have to do that when BOINC client is shutdown. So maybe do that when you shutdown now.

When you restart BOINC client it might fix the problem with "waiting for GPU memory". It might not.

You may have to reboot the OS or even power down the computer.

I suspect what has happened is you've got 8 SETI GPU tasks and they all want memory at the same time. Perhaps you haven't seen this problem before because you've never had 8 SETI GPU tasks all line up at the same time, perhaps until now it was a mixture of GPU and non-GPU tasks which would demand less GPU memory.

I see you have 2 GB vid RAM so it should handle more than 1 GPU task easily. You may have to do some configuring with an app_info.xml file. Jord can tell you more about that.

One more thought, before you shutdown BOINC, make a note of whether they're all GPU tasks then suspend all of them and set SETI to No New Tasks. When you restart BOINC, Resume the SETI tasks one by one, slowly, and see at which point the "waiting for Memory" status returns, if it returns at all.

No matter what you do, Seti still doesn't run any science apps by default on an ATI GPU. You'd have to use third party applications for that, as in ones from Dotsch or Lunatics. But as far as I know, there are none for OS X, as ATI GPU detection itself is flaky still under OS X.

@Jimmy: The "waiting for GPU memory" thing is a bug that got squashed only recently, but only in 6.13 if I am not mistaken. However I am not telling you to go use 6.13, as this is extremely buggy. Instead I'll go ask the developer for the Mac to back-port the fix to a next 6.12, or ask if he has done so already.

Hi Jord,

Glad to help!

I copy-and-pasted the text you provided into TextEdit and saved the document using the Word 2003 Format (.xml) choice in the File Format drop down menue that appeared in the Save As dialog box...page saved as "cc_config.xml" as requested. Get info shows the document to be a XML Text Document that will open with Dashcode. If you'd like to see the contents of how that document opens in Dashcode, kindly let me know.

Just so I know (and can get more familiar with the workings of BOINC Manager)...I then installed the document in Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support/BOINC Data and then tried to read/run(?) the config file as you described, however nothing happened...e.g. no window/document/popup/whatever opened to indicate that the request was being carried out...um, so what should happen when I "open BOINC Manager->Advanced view->Advanced->Read config file"?

Does BOINC Manager need to be quit and restarted for this to take effect?

:)
Jimmy G

Hi Jord,

Followup from my previous post...

I ran the BOINC Manager Event Log to see if anything showed up in there...

Tue Sep 27 19:38:06 2011 Re-reading cc_config.xml (black text)
Tue Sep 27 19:38:06 2011 Missing start tag in cc_config.xml (red text)
Tue Sep 27 19:38:06 2011 log flags: file_xfer, sched_ops, task (black text)

...hope that helps!

:)
JG

Hi Dagorath,

Thanks for the update on this...I was thinking perhaps some code was missing or maybe it didn't like the format.

For the benefit of our viewing audience it should be noted by Mac users that TextEdit v1.6 saves only in the following formats (as appears in the Save As drop down menu)...

Rich Text Format
Rich Text Format with Attachments
Web Page (.html)
Web Archive
OpenDocument Text (.odt)
Word 2007 Format (.docx)
Word 2003 (.xml)
Word 97 Format (.doc)

...and is not suitable for creating XML documents for these purposes. Apparently the old .txt format went bye-bye along the way... :(

You should not have saved the file in Word 2003 (.xml) format. That's what's caused the error.

Delete cc_config.xml, copy and paste that xml code Jord gave you in his last post into TextEdit. Double check that you did the copy/paste properly because it won't work if even 1 character is missing. When you save the file save it in "plain text (ANSI)" format if that's one of the available formats in the list. If not then "plain text" or "text" will do. After saving it, double check that it has the .xml extension and not .txt. If it has .txt extension then rename it. Do not save it in Word 2003 format.

Then do Advanced -> Read Config File again and look in the Event Log to see if it read the file without error(s).

Hi Dagorath,

Well, hopefully, this will reveal something!

Thanks so much for your patience on working through this with me!

:)
JG

Hi Dagorath,

Thanks for the tips on searching for messages in the log, it'll come in helpful should the need arise!

As for the ever growing log file...are there any max size limitations I should be "mindful of"? It would be nice to be able to purge the log file every day, short of having to do a shutdown and restart of the softwares.

FWIW, during this morning's "suspend CPDN/resume SETI" project swap I put a couple of the WUs into suspend (the rest being not) to see if that precipitated any bad behavior...nothing to report. I'll be tossing in other possible user variables between swaps to see if I can break the thing again...I'll keep you posted here should I succeed!

:)
JG

Hi Jord,

Thanks for the info on the stdoutdae.txt and stdoutdae.old files...good to know.

Update...

On a hunch I decided to rifle through the stdoutdae.old file and discovered a few things. But, first a bit of back story...

I recall that early in my preference tweakings that I was trying to determine just how many processor cores to allot to BOINC and had settled on 4, thinking that since the 3.4GHz i7 in my iMac has only 4 physical cores and that the remaining 4 cores are virtual that there would be no sense to try and use them. So I had set my preferences, both in BOINC Manager and online, to On multiprocessors, Use at most 4 processors with On Multiprocessors. use at most 100% of the processors selected. And for the first few days BOINC Manager used 4 processors only.


In using the software I was continuing to play with preference settings, both in software and online to see if I could discern how things were being applied to BOINC Manager (trying to learn, here). And somewhere along the way BOINC Manager was showing me that 8 WUs were now being worked on instead of, what up until then had been, the "normal" 4! I remember thinking, "what the hey?" and tried to investigate how that had occurred. Preferences both in software and online still said 4 and 100%. Hmmm.

Later that evening when I went to suspend SETI and resume CPDN for the night an anomaly occurred...on putting SETI into Suspend the Project window in Advanced View went blank, no projects to be seen! "What the hey?" So I went under the Task Tab and saw everything gone in there, too. "Hmmm, what to do? Restart the software? Don't want to lose everything. Hmmm. Checked preferences, everything seems fine there. Decided to look into the menus to see if there was anything of help there to be found." While in the View drop down I decided to go back to Project view (instead of hitting the window tab) and...voila!...everything came back into view! Cool, problem solved, I switched CPDN on for the night and called it a day.

The following morning when I went to swap CPDN for SETI is when I began encountering the Waiting for GPU memory problem.

Back to the stdoutdae.old file...

I decided to investigate that file to see if it would tell me where this change over from 4 to 8 took place and why...what happened during the whiteout that occured when changing from SETI to CPDN...what happened when the first Waiting for GPU appeared. And, there are some notations at those events in the log, but I have no way of knowing what they're telling me. Possibly this is all related?

Would you folks like to take a look at this information? I can either post what I think are the important lines here or I can send the file along to you in an email with the times marked for when those events took place. Let me know what works for you.

:)
JG

So I had set my preferences, both in BOINC Manager and online, to On multiprocessors, Use at most 4 processors with On Multiprocessors. use at most 100% of the processors selected. And for the first few days BOINC Manager used 4 processors only.

@ Gundolf...

Well, all I can say is that when I had it set to 1 processor it used 1 processor, when I bumped it up to 2 it used 2, and when I asked for it to use 4 it used 4. (OSX 10.6.8 BOINC Manager 6.12.35 (x86)) What I was noting, earlier, was the change from 4 to 8 processors occurring without user interaction. At all times in my setup experiments 100% CPU had been constant....at least I don't recall ever having changed that parameter.


@ Jord...

You've got mail...the file and notes are on in your mailbox. :)

FWIW, as for memory issues. I can say, from monitoring these activities in realtime, that excessive RAM usage has never been an issue with SETI...at most, system, browser, other softwares and SETI working simultaneously never exceeded 60% of the 16GB RAM.

Forgive my ignorance, but how would one know if a SETI WU was a either Astropulse or Multibeam?

v6.13 being, um, beta? Let me get comfortable driving this Buick, first...then I'll consider your offer to take the new one for a spin. :) FWIW, a lot has changed here in SETIland since I last crunched numbers on a 2GHz G5 single-processor iMac a few years back...Rip Van Winkle effect...heck, in one week's time I've more than doubled what that old machine had taken months to produce...all that, without any GPU-cruching! (BTW, are those numbers for real?! Yikes!)

So, uh, Guinea pig is higher rank than Lab Rat? ;)

Thanks for the xml cpu lines...not sure how to put those to use... :)

Best,
JG