Another new one. Currently for Mac and Windows. Report any problems you get with it to the Alpha email list. This list needs registration.

The un-official change log...

Rom 7 October 2009
- MGR: Fix the Statistics page Save/Restore project display feature.

Charlie 8 October 2009
- MGR: If aborting multiple tasks, ask "Are you sure?" only once.

Rom 16 October 2009
- client: Fix crash that was introduced 7 months ago. (From Nicolás Alvarez)

- client: remove redundant 0s in job log

- client: add --unsigned_apps_ok cmdline option and <unsigned_apps_ok> config option. This tells the client to allow unsigned apps. For testing. No file xfers or other network traffic will be allowed if set.

- client: add <exit_after_finish> option (same as cmdline flag)

- client: add <skip_cpu_benchmarks> option (same as cmdline flag)

- client: print message if abort past-deadline unstarted job

- client: improve message when have NVIDIA drivers but no GPU

- client: if anonymous platform description (app_info.xml) doesn't specify FLOPS for a GPU app, assume that it runs at CPU peak speed rather than GPU peak speed. Better to be conservative, otherwise job might be aborted due to time limit exceeded.

- client: on startup, if a coproc needed by a job is missing, set a "coproc_missing" flag rather than aborting the job. If use removes a GPU board while there's a large queue of GPU jobs, they'll stay queued (until their deadline passes).

Note: this doesn't fix the situation where user connects via Remote Desktop while GPU jobs are running or queued. We should check for Remote Desktop every minute or so, and stop GPU jobs.

- client: the get_all_projects_list() RPC doesn't require auth

- client: don't multiply checkpoint interval (i.e., "disk interval" pref) by # processors.

- actually, make it "Tasks checkpoint to disk at most every ..." and change it in the advanced prefs dialog too

- LIB: Make the is_remote_desktop compilable for all VS versions and SKUs.

- MGR: Fix initial first connection problem on startup. I'm not sure why it was only happening at startup, there might have been a few crashes because of this issue as well. The basic problem is that wxWidgets had an exception handler around the initial frame creation and when the first GUI RPC was issued to detect whether or not we were atached to an account manager during menu creation the GUI thread would go about doing idle processing while waiting for the GUI RPC thread to initialize. During this time the frame pointer is NULL and was getting dereferenced which would halt window construction and stay there until some other event was fired.

- MGR: Initial dose of code cleanup and shuffling. Order the menu functions in the order in which they are displayed in the menu.

- client: address the situation where GPUs become unusable for certain periods (e.g. when Remote Desktop is used on Win).

* add is_usable() member function to COPROC.

Currently this just calls the respective (CUDA or CAL) initialization function. We need to check whether this works and/or causes problems.

* in enforce_schedule(), check whether usability has changed for each GPU type.

If we've gone from usable to unusable, flag all jobs for that GPU as coproc_missing (so they won't get run, and will quit if they're running). If we've gone from unusable to usable, clear the flag.

This should deal with all cases except where the client is started up with GPUs unusable.

- client: bug fixes to the above. Don't fetch work for an unable resource.

- update cal.h to current ATI code

- client/scheduler: standardize the FLOPS estimate between NVIDIA and ATI. Make them both peak FLOPS, according to the formula supplied by the manufacturer.

The impact on the client is minor:

* the startup message describing the GPU
* the weight of the resource type in computing long term debt

On the server, I changed the example app_plan() function to assume that app FLOPS is 20% of peak FLOPS (that's about what it is for SETI@home).

- client: the weight of GPU debt in computing total debt should be (estimated throughput of all GPUs) (estimated throughput of all CPUs) rather than the ratio of 1 GPU to 1 CPU. This change will hopefully cause ratios of granted credit to more closely match resource shares.

- client: multi-thread jobs were being given too high priority; in particular, they were preempting jobs in the middle of time slice.

Solution:
1) don't use MT in the sort order defined by more_important().
2) add a 2nd reordering in which MT jobs are moved ahead of non-MT jobs, but only if #CPUs used is < #CPUs (see promote_multi_thread_jobs())

- client: the seqno of jobs in progress but not selected was being set to zero. It should be runnable_jobs.size(). This could potentially cause wrong scheduling decisions.

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BOINC blog

has anyone else experience where wu's seem to not run but still log time when playing games with 6.10.14, i know dave and the gang were trying to get it to where it would run while running in the back ground automatically,..

just wondering if anyone else noticed this?

game: sins of a solar empire... maybe it's just me as my 900 planet map eats the memory of the card up.

has anyone else experience where wu's seem to not run but still log time when playing games with 6.10.14, i know dave and the gang were trying to get it to where it would run while running in the back ground automatically,..

just wondering if anyone else noticed this?

game: sins of a solar empire... maybe it's just me as my 900 planet map eats the memory of the card up.

Yes, seeing this also, even with some less graphic intensice games.

Also, on one of my computers I saw that 9/10 WU's were ending with ERROR WHILE COMPUTING. Using WinXP SP3 (32bit), nvidia 191.07, Boinc 6.10.14, BFGTech GTX285 OCX. I saw this with Boinc 6.10.13 also, although not as often. This also happens when I set my options to not use GPU for crunching while computer is in use. Anyway, I was getting this only on 1 of my computers, so I thought it might not be so much software related. So last night I downclocked my GTX285 OCX to stock (as per nvidia's website). Will see how the WU's turn out now. The other cards I'll leave untouched for now, as they seem to crunch okay even though they have the same OC'd cards installed.

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Semper ubi sub ubi.

Superceeded now. See BOINC 6.10.15 message thread for details.

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BOINC blog