Dear all,

GPUGRID will stop supporting Windows XP in April 2018

Every version of the science application we have to maintain costs us time and effort, and it's important that we focus our resources where they can give us the best return.

Building and testing Windows XP versions our applications is increasingly difficult now the OS is unsupported by both Microsoft and NVIDIA.
There are now fewer than 20 Windows XP machines crunching on GPUGrid, out of a total of over 2500, and it's difficult to justify on-going engineering effort for a small fraction of our capacity.

Sadly, this means that it's time for us to stop supporting Windows XP. The recent update to the application will be the last, and will cease to work one year from now. After that time work will only be issued to hosts running Windows 7+ or Linux.

If this affects you, please accept my apologies. Your contribution has been greatly appreciated, and I hope that you'll continue to support us.

Matt

Matt,
Thank you for your efforts!
(I can give you remote access to my Win XP hosts if you want...)

I appreciate your efforts

Thank you for explaining why you are doing what you are doing and I personally greatly appreciate you letting us use windows XP for another year.

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Cruncher/Learner in progress.

Thank you for explaining why you are doing what you are doing and I personally greatly appreciate you letting us use windows XP for another year.

+1

Good to know. I actually obtained a copy of WinXP specifically for GPUGrid. I was going to try to create a dual-boot machine. Doesn't seem worth it to put the resources into building a new rig now. I'll just build onto what I've got.

Regarding the recent WannaCrypt attacks, Microsoft has released a vulnerability patch for older operating systems as well.
This update won't download automatically, as it has not been put into Windows Update.
You can find the original technet blogpost here (but it throws a runtime error right now).
There's a lot of links in that post to the patches for older operating systems.
However I can provide a direct download link for Windows XP x64 / Windows Server 2003 x64 (English only)
You can also do a search for kb4012598 on the web.
You can select the appropriate patch for your os from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

Regarding the recent WannaCrypt attacks, Microsoft has released a vulnerability patch for older operating systems as well.
This update won't download automatically, as it has not been put into Windows Update.
You can find the original technet blogpost here (but it throws a runtime error right now).
There's a lot of links in that post to the patches for older operating systems.
However I can provide a direct download link for Windows XP x64 / Windows Server 2003 x64 (English only)
You can also do a search for kb4012598 on the web.
You can select the appropriate patch for your os from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

Thank you Zoltan! I appreciate it!

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Cruncher/Learner in progress.

Thank you Zoltan! I appreciate it!

+1

Chapeau!

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I would love to see HCF1 protein folding and interaction simulations to help my little boy... someday.

Stefan wrote:

Matt has effectively left our team so now we have hired a new person to work on Acemd and it's replacement in Acemd3.

As you may remember, last April Matt announced that Windows XP support will definitely be stopped in April 2018.
I strongly had the feeling that this was a decision made by himself, as he probably planned not take his time to put together another crunching software for XP.

Now that Matt has left GPUGRID, I hope that the team and the new person see the situation differently, and that the crunchers who still use Windows XP for good reason will get a crunching software beyond April 2018.

Stefan wrote:

Matt has effectively left our team so now we have hired a new person to work on Acemd and it's replacement in Acemd3.

As you may remember, last April Matt announced that Windows XP support will definitely be stopped in April 2018.
I strongly had the feeling that this was a decision made by himself, as he probably planned not take his time to put together another crunching software for XP.

Now that Matt has left GPUGRID, I hope that the team and the new person see the situation differently, and that the crunchers who still use Windows XP for good reason will get a crunching software beyond April 2018.

I agree that support should continue for xp as long as the video cards that it supports are still relevant to the project.

Here is an example of an obsolete computer, running an obsolete operating system, with an obsolete video driver in the top 10 in the performance tab:


Rank User name Average (h) Total crunched (WU) GPU description of fastest setup
1 Phil 5.08235 17 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (4095MB) driver: 384.94
2 Retvari Zoltan 6.03388 121 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti (4095MB) driver: 358.50
3 PappaLitto 6.10000 54 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (4095MB) driver: 385.41
4 Bedrich Hajek 6.13636 11 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti (4095MB) driver: 355.82
5 Thurgwood 6.22727 11 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (4095MB) driver: 382.33
6 Tobi 6.35294 17 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (4095MB) driver: 385.41
7 bcavnaugh 6.45224 67 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (4095MB) driver: 378.92
8 Trotador 6.57273 22 [2] NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (4095MB) driver: 370.28
9 Jackal 6.67368 38 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (4095MB) driver: 385.28
10 Drallin 6.74375 16 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (4095MB) driver: 385.41

It's actually number 4 right now, ahead of a few (not all) pascals, but still relevant.

Did they hire the new technical people, yet?

Regarding the recent WannaCrypt attacks, Microsoft has released a vulnerability patch for older operating systems as well.
This update won't download automatically, as it has not been put into Windows Update.
You can find the original technet blogpost here (but it throws a runtime error right now).
There's a lot of links in that post to the patches for older operating systems.
However I can provide a direct download link for Windows XP x64 / Windows Server 2003 x64 (English only)
You can also do a search for kb4012598 on the web.
You can select the appropriate patch for your os from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

Sorry for the much belated reply to this...

Another way to block wanacry is to block netbios ports, both incoming from the internet and outgoing to the internet on a firewall. There is no reason to have those ports open anyway. I have had those ports blocked to/from the internet for well over ten years, and I have not noticed any issues from having them blocked. The fact that I had them blocked may have prevented problems.

I am on the side of retiring the app for XP, and it seems that the project has decided that due to the fact that so few users are running XP at this point. As a software engineer, I agree with this. The company that I worked for dropped XP support a few years back. XP simply will not run software developed with the latest compilers, and supporting such machines becomes a nightmare scenario

I personally have an XP x64 box, but there are no longer even Windows Defender updates for it. It is a dual core Opteron machine on which I ran this project; however, these days, it consumes a lot of power in comparison to newer machines for far less computational power even if I did put a newer GPU in it.

If people still want to run a machine like that and they have the technical knowledge to do so, I suggest wiping the machine and installing a Linux variant - or if the budget allows, buy an OEM version of 7 or 8.1 or, perhaps, 10 (assuming 10 still supports the hardware) and install that. However, with aged hardware, Linux would be a better choice, IMO.

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I agree that support should continue for xp as long as the video cards that it supports are still relevant to the project.

Me too.

Here is an example of an obsolete computer, running an obsolete operating system, with an obsolete video driver in the top 10 in the performance tab:

Rank	User name	Avg (h)	Total	GPU description of fastest setup
1	Phil		5.08235	17	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (4095MB) driver: 384.94
2	Retvari Zoltan	6.03388	121	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980  Ti (4095MB) driver: 358.50
3	PappaLitto	6.10000	54	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (4095MB) driver: 385.41
4	Bedrich Hajek	6.13636	11	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980  Ti (4095MB) driver: 355.82
5	Thurgwood	6.22727	11	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (4095MB) driver: 382.33
6	Tobi		6.35294	17	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (4095MB) driver: 385.41
7	bcavnaugh	6.45224	67	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti (4095MB) driver: 378.92
8	Trotador	6.57273	22  [2] NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080    (4095MB) driver: 370.28
9	Jackal		6.67368	38	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080    (4095MB) driver: 385.28
10	Drallin		6.74375	16	NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080    (4095MB) driver: 385.41

It's actually number 4 right now, ahead of a few (not all) pascals, but still relevant.

My WinXPx64 host is number 2 on this list.

Did they hire the new technical people, yet?

There's no sign of that.

I agree that support should continue for xp as long as the video cards that it supports are still relevant to the project.

I, too !

Did they hire the new technical people, yet?

There's no sign of that.

Let's hence hope that they will have someone on bord before April 2018 for prolongation of the crunching software version for WinXP

Xp will stop as announced. The number of Xp hosts is very small compared to the rest. If you can please update to Win10.

gdf

I mean, we will compile under Windows10 and make no tests on WindowsXP. If it works, then ok.

gdf

Xp will stop as announced. The number of Xp hosts is very small compared to the rest.

This is bad news, indeed :-(

I mean, we will compile under Windows10 and make no tests on WindowsXP. If it works, then ok.
gdf

well, it will definitely NOT work under WindowsXP as long as there isn't a seperate crunching software for XP (like acemd.849-65.exe right now for XP - in contrast to acemd-918-80.exe for Win7/10).

Well... on the bright side we still have until April at least!

Also, there's always Ubuntu (Linux) which definitely uses more GPU usage than windows 10 does! Not as good and steady as XP but it's a good route to take after April, in my opinion.

Besides that I suggest everyone sell their old gpu's and go to the 10 series considering they are so much faster and power efficient. You won't regret it. My 1060 performs faster on windows 10 with WDDM by a few hours at least compared to my 960 being at 99% usage without WDDM .

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Cruncher/Learner in progress.