BTW, we posted the application update and plan to make an official announcement tomorrow. Our site is getting quite a bit of traffic now but hopefully it will settle down soon.

This may be a dumb question, but is there anything different that I need to do to utilize this update? Thanks.

This may be a dumb question, but is there anything different that I need to do to utilize this update? Thanks.

Nope.
As you finish any existing work and download new work (although there's none available at the moment), the new Application will be downloaded automatically by the Manager.

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Grant
Darwin NT

Many thanks everyone. Got some tasks now, though nothing for NVIDIA yet.

Many thanks everyone. Got some tasks now, though nothing for NVIDIA yet.

It's CPU only, so that may explain it ;)

4.12 is running very poorly on AMD.

Average processing rate is reasonable measure to go on. 4.07 my 3990x was regularly hitting over 30 GFLOPS on x86_64. If you look now its been left on 19 but that's an anomaly.

4.12 I can't get it over 11.5 no matter how many cores I run. Yet 2 of the 3 old laptops I have running this with vastly slower chips are hitting over 12 running the same work units.

Something is clearly wrong and I did notice immediately but have had no response to other posts.

4.12 is running very poorly on AMD.

Average processing rate is reasonable measure to go on. 4.07 my 3990x was regularly hitting over 30 GFLOPS on x86_64. If you look now its been left on 19 but that's an anomaly.

4.12 I can't get it over 11.5 no matter how many cores I run. Yet 2 of the 3 old laptops I have running this with vastly slower chips are hitting over 12 running the same work units.

Something is clearly wrong and I did notice immediately but have had no response to other posts.

On CPUs with very high numbers of cores, the speed of the path from the CPU to the memory is usually inadequate for effective use of all the cores at once, especially for programs with heavy use of the L3 cache in the CPU. The 4.12 program is significantly larger than the 4.07 program, and therefore likely to have heavier L3 use.

You may need to experiment with various numbers of cores in use, and draw a graph of total throughput per day versus number of cores in use, so you can get the maximum total throughput in a day.

Also, Rosetta work seems to run best when the computer has at least 2 GB of memory per processor in use, and your computer has considerably less.

What kind of drive are you running BOINC from? An SSD drive instead of a hard drive helps the speed considerably.

Whether the CPU was made by AMD or by Intel is not the major factor in this problem.

4.12 is running very poorly on AMD.

Average processing rate is reasonable measure to go on. 4.07 my 3990x was regularly hitting over 30 GFLOPS on x86_64. If you look now its been left on 19 but that's an anomaly.

4.12 I can't get it over 11.5 no matter how many cores I run. Yet 2 of the 3 old laptops I have running this with vastly slower chips are hitting over 12 running the same work units.

Something is clearly wrong and I did notice immediately but have had no response to other posts.

On CPUs with very high numbers of cores, the speed of the path from the CPU to the memory is usually inadequate for effective use of all the cores at once, especially for programs with heavy use of the L3 cache in the CPU. The 4.12 program is significantly larger than the 4.07 program, and therefore likely to have heavier L3 use.

You may need to experiment with various numbers of cores in use, and draw a graph of total throughput per day versus number of cores in use, so you can get the maximum total throughput in a day.

Whether the CPU was made by AMD or by Intel is not the major factor in this problem.

Well each core has 4.2mb of L3, more than the Intel chips. I've tried with 8mb of L3 per core, no difference.

The i5 processor has only 3MB in total 1.5 per core. It clearly isn't down to L3 cache levels.

I'm only running it on the 64 cores, so has 2gb per core, although not running the full 64. I've tried on just 32 cores, makes no difference. Like I said, was running at 3 times the speed of the intel laptops which are slower and have considerably less cache on the 4.07 tasks, now regardless it's running marginally slower than them. That is an enormous drop.

ssd drive

There are other posts from people running AMD chips noticing their temps and power usage is reduced, all indicating less work being done, for whatever reason.

My clock speed is also up depending on wu between 10% and 30%, which again suggests that the chip is running faster but doing less per cycle.

4.12 is running very poorly on AMD.

[snip]

On CPUs with very high numbers of cores, the speed of the path from the CPU to the memory is usually inadequate for effective use of all the cores at once, especially for programs with heavy use of the L3 cache in the CPU. The 4.12 program is significantly larger than the 4.07 program, and therefore likely to have heavier L3 use.

You may need to experiment with various numbers of cores in use, and draw a graph of total throughput per day versus number of cores in use, so you can get the maximum total throughput in a day.

Whether the CPU was made by AMD or by Intel is not the major factor in this problem.

Well each core has 4.2mb of L3, more than the Intel chips. I've tried with 8mb of L3 per core, no difference.

The i5 processor has only 3MB in total 1.5 per core. It clearly isn't down to L3 cache levels.

I'm only running it on the 64 cores, so has 2gb per core, although not running the full 64. I've tried on just 32 cores, makes no difference. Like I said, was running at 3 times the speed of the intel laptops which are slower and have considerably less cache on the 4.07 tasks, now regardless it's running marginally slower than them. That is an enormous drop.

ssd drive

There are other posts from people running AMD chips noticing their temps and power usage is reduced, all indicating less work being done, for whatever reason.

My clock speed is also up depending on wu between 10% and 30%, which again suggests that the chip is running faster but doing less per cycle.

I misread your total amount of main memory.

All of the cores must share the same path to main memory. With today's memory speeds, that means that each core in use spends most of its cycles waiting for access to the main memory, rather than doing any useful work, if many cores are in use. This reduces the power used, and therefore the amount of heat generated.

If you are using less than half of the total number of processors on the CPU chip, turning off hyperthreading, or AMD's equivalent, often helps somewhat.

I'm not saying that which company made the CPU has no effect, I just expect it to be much less than many cores using the same path to main memory. Recompiling 4.12 to take advantage of the things the AMD CPU has but Intel CPUs don't would offer some help, but that's not something I can do.

4.12 is running very poorly on AMD.

[snip]

On CPUs with very high numbers of cores, the speed of the path from the CPU to the memory is usually inadequate for effective use of all the cores at once, especially for programs with heavy use of the L3 cache in the CPU. The 4.12 program is significantly larger than the 4.07 program, and therefore likely to have heavier L3 use.

You may need to experiment with various numbers of cores in use, and draw a graph of total throughput per day versus number of cores in use, so you can get the maximum total throughput in a day.

Whether the CPU was made by AMD or by Intel is not the major factor in this problem.

Well each core has 4.2mb of L3, more than the Intel chips. I've tried with 8mb of L3 per core, no difference.

The i5 processor has only 3MB in total 1.5 per core. It clearly isn't down to L3 cache levels.

I'm only running it on the 64 cores, so has 2gb per core, although not running the full 64. I've tried on just 32 cores, makes no difference. Like I said, was running at 3 times the speed of the intel laptops which are slower and have considerably less cache on the 4.07 tasks, now regardless it's running marginally slower than them. That is an enormous drop.

ssd drive

There are other posts from people running AMD chips noticing their temps and power usage is reduced, all indicating less work being done, for whatever reason.

My clock speed is also up depending on wu between 10% and 30%, which again suggests that the chip is running faster but doing less per cycle.

I misread your total amount of main memory.

All of the cores must share the same path to main memory. With today's memory speeds, that means that each core in use spends most of its cycles waiting for access to the main memory, rather than doing any useful work, if many cores are in use. This reduces the power used, and therefore the amount of heat generated.

If you are using less than half of the total number of processors on the CPU chip, turning off hyperthreading, or AMD's equivalent, often helps somewhat.

I'm not saying that which company made the CPU has no effect, I just expect it to be much less than many cores using the same path to main memory. Recompiling 4.12 to take advantage of the things the AMD CPU has but Intel CPUs don't would offer some help, but that's not something I can do.

Yes, smt/hyper threading is off. The point is though, on my Intel laptops, the speed has remained the same between 4.07 to 4.12. On my tr it's dropped over 60% regardless of what I try, I can't put it much simpler than that.

Many thanks everyone. Got some tasks now, though nothing for NVIDIA yet.

It's CPU only, so that may explain it ;)

Thank you very much. Newbie ignorance!

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[snip]

Yes, smt/hyper threading is off. The point is though, on my Intel laptops, the speed has remained the same between 4.07 to 4.12. On my tr it's dropped over 60% regardless of what I try, I can't put it much simpler than that.

Note that all of your Intel laptops have a much lower number of cores, and will therefore have much less of a problem with too many cores trying to share the limited speed path to main memory. I can't put it much simpler than that, either.

[snip]

Yes, smt/hyper threading is off. The point is though, on my Intel laptops, the speed has remained the same between 4.07 to 4.12. On my tr it's dropped over 60% regardless of what I try, I can't put it much simpler than that.

Note that all of your Intel laptops have a much lower number of cores, and will therefore have much less of a problem with too many cores trying to share the limited speed path to main memory. I can't put it much simpler than that, either.

4.07 is the reference yes. 4.12 is 60% slower than that, I don't know what is so difficult to understand, it's has nothing to do with memory or anything else. You dont have a 64/128 chip to only run it on 5 cores to keep the same productivity because of a software change. Is there a mod/developer that can possibly comment on this issue?

@bcov:

Why is low-credit granting retroactive?
I downloaded a bunch of covid-19 tasks on the 29th of March. I'm reporting now and getting 2cr. instead of ~200cr.

I thought issue would affect only new tasks downloaded after the 31st of March.

My app version is 4.08.

Please open a new thread for your issue. Please define what you are seeing that indicates things are slow.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Not sure what retroactive aspect you are talking about. This is not mentioned in the post you referenced.

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Rosetta Moderator: Mod.Sense

Not sure what retroactive aspect you are talking about. This is not mentioned in the post you referenced.

Covid-19 wu
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/result.php?resultid=1136817690

Only 2cr today, although I downloaded on 29 Mar 2020. I expected no problem with credits, but I was wrong.

Not sure what retroactive aspect you are talking about. This is not mentioned in the post you referenced.

Well, there was a thread about this issue and you referred to admin's post.
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/forum_thread.php?id=13672&postid=92969#92969

Maybe I should have posted there.

A bank I have an account with though suggested a a day and a half ago that I download a security app

Yeah, that'll do it too. Some AV programmes also have a nasty habit of deleting BOINC Tasks as they download because they don't like the look of them, or think the programme's behaviour is supicious.

I use the Windows Defender AV program, available free from Microsoft if you have a sufficiently recent version of Windows.

It does not have that nasty habit.

However, a Google search for where to download it gave only three sites, none of which will currently respond.

Thanks. I already have McAfee as part of Verizon's security package which has other pieces. The thing the bank wanted me to install (and which I foolishly did instal) was Easy Solutions. That should have been a clue. NOTHING is EVER easy!

- Dick

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A bank I have an account with though suggested a a day and a half ago that I download a security app

Yeah, that'll do it too. Some AV programmes also have a nasty habit of deleting BOINC Tasks as they download because they don't like the look of them, or think the programme's behaviour is supicious.
Glad you got it sorted.

If you're ever in my neighborhood (MA, USA), PM me and I owe you a beer!

I'm one of those very rare Aussies that don't drink. But a Coke (original i think they are over your way) would hit the spot.
:-)

Although it's going to be quite a while before international travel is on the cards for the average person again.

You got a deal. My email is my username on gmail. :-)

- Dick

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[snip]

Yes, smt/hyper threading is off. The point is though, on my Intel laptops, the speed has remained the same between 4.07 to 4.12. On my tr it's dropped over 60% regardless of what I try, I can't put it much simpler than that.

Note that all of your Intel laptops have a much lower number of cores, and will therefore have much less of a problem with too many cores trying to share the limited speed path to main memory. I can't put it much simpler than that, either.

4.07 is the reference yes. 4.12 is 60% slower than that, I don't know what is so difficult to understand, it's has nothing to do with memory or anything else. You dont have a 64/128 chip to only run it on 5 cores to keep the same productivity because of a software change. Is there a mod/developer that can possibly comment on this issue?

Resource contention, nothing less, nothing more. Nothing exotic or unknowable. ZEN architecture is strong on memory bandwidth but bad on memory latency. Even if you have relatively larger cache there will be still lots of memory access that has to be fulfilled from main memory. Because of that too many core doing access will overload memory bus and their performance will drop of sharply. (Especially when latency of memory access is already high)

I suggest you experiment with number of concurrent task for RAH to find equilibrium. Alternately, you could try to see if you can get memory to higher frequency without worsening its timing. Also ensure that there is no swapping. (IIRC each 4.12 task needs about 2GB of RAM which amounts to about 128GB of RAM in use beside all other processes already running)

For the last 12 hours it's been using only 28 cores. No difference in performance unfortunately. I'll probably switch to folding at home with it as it costs the same to run regardless of how many cores are running. The folding software scales performance with core count so no issues there.