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Mixed news

2020-07-09: BOINC, Rosetta@home expands COVID-19 research

The computing power supplied by BOINC volunteers is allowing Rosetta@home to do exciting new research in the fight against COVID-19.

2020-07-08: Minecraft@Home, Kaktwoos 2.03 and Badges!

You may have seen many workunits just disappear from existence today.



Worry not! We realised there were far too many workunits scanning duplicate seeds, so we've scaled back the original workunits to the correct seed ranges (no in-progress results were touched, so none of you should have lost any credit).

We have located some promising seed candidates which were missed from processing and can be used as an input to this job, so they are currently set as the highest priority.

Also, we now have badges! If you view the forums, any comments in threads, or on the leaderboards; you will see the new badges.
We're open to suggestions for future badges, so please leave us some comments on this thread.

2020-07-08: Asteroids@home, Server outage resolved

I am sorry for server outages which was happening recently. There were several factors which often caused lack of free space and some services crashed and I had to do an emergency shutdown on Saturday in order to fix everything so I couldn't inform you about it except for Twitter. There is still a hardware problem with one of servers which I have to fix but the server is not being used now so project should be stable now.

Radim Van?o (FoxKyong)

2020-07-07: MLC@Home, Windows support lands, and updates on dataset and progress

Today MLC@Home is proud to announce Windows 64-bit support[!
Windows support joins the existing Linux 64-bit bit support already available.

After 1 week, MLC@Home contributors have finished over 100,000 workunits, and trained over 14,000 neural networks. That's tremendous, thank you all for your support; and there's a lot more just on the horizon, so keep crunching!

-- The MLC@Home Admin(s)

2020-07-07: MilkyWay@home, New Runs for MilkyWay@home Nbody Simulations (07/07/2020)

Hey all,

The last set of N-body runs we set up started converging to compact progenitors due to an overly restrictive data histogram. We have fixed the data histogram and placed new runs up on the server:
-de_nbody_07_07_2020_v176_40k__data__1
-de_nbody_07_07_2020_v176_40k__data__2
-de_nbody_07_07_2020_v176_40k__data__3

Please let us know if these runs cause any problems, and thank you all for your support.

-Eric

2020-07-06: Minecraft@Home, Issue with latest app version: kaktwoos 202

Our sincere apologies to all users, it seems our last update to kaktwoos (version 202) failed.
We're working to restore normal service shortly.

2020-07-05: iThena, iThena Cnode application - new credits settings

According to the forum post:
https://root.ithena.net/usr/forum_thread.php?id=39&postid=658#658

I'm going to introduce better credit for Thena CNode tasks.

I will initially set 2 credits per task.

New settings will only be visible after a certain period of time.

The current tasks still have the old configuration. However, the new tasks will already have higher credit values.

The update of the historical "cnode beta" series badges has been disabled.
These badges will no longer be changed.

2020-07-05: MLC@Home, Stats are now exported; requires consent

The project is now exporting stats for stat aggregator sites. I've also enabled stat export consent which defaults to "no". If you would like your stats exported, please check the "Do you consent to exporting your data to BOINC statistics aggregation Web sites?" option under "Project->Preferences".

Thanks again for your support!

2020-07-03: MLC@Home, MLDS release v0.911

Application v0.911 is out, as a bugfix for the 0.91 release earlier today.

This application is compiled with the same software as the original v0.90 This has means a) CentOS 7 is once again not supported, bug b) the extra crashes associated on non-Centos systems should go away. This update also fixes a checkpoint/snapshot issue present in 0.90.


Please report any further issues in the forum.

2020-07-03: Minecraft@Home, Profile creation and OpenCL vendor pinning

In the last news post, I advised everyone to create a profile in order to be eligible for 'user of the day' selection.
Unfortunately, there was an issue with the ReCaptcha implementation which prevented this. This issue is now resolved.

Now, you are able to create a profile here.

Also, good news for hosts with OpenCL capable hardware from more than one vendor (e.g. an Intel iGPU and an Nvidia GPU)
The latest update to the kaktwoos app should ensure the tasks run on the correct device.
If you are a user with a multi-vendor host, please keep an eye on your results and let us know if you're having any issues.

As always, please get involved with the conversation in the message boards, and join the Discord!

2020-07-01: World Community Grid, FightAIDS@Home ? Phase 1 researchers identified new potential targets for antivirals

A protein called HIV-1 capsid (CA), which is crucial to the replication of HIV, may have some recently discovered vulnerabilities.

2020-07-01: LHC@Home, CMS job rundown

We need to do some tests of a patch to fix a bug that's been plaguing us for some time. To this end, I am letting the job queues drain, so there will be an absence of CMS jobs -- perhaps as soon as tomorrow morning, depending on how we continue to recover from today's Oracle quota problem.
So, be prepared to set No New Tasks as soon as you see any sign of lack of jobs -- or sooner if you prefer.
I don't know how long the testing will take, there are many factors at work (if the BOINC server sees that there are no jobs available, it will stop sending tasks; that will mean it takes longer for each test batch to be recognised and start serving jobs).

2020-07-01: Minecraft@Home, MultiGPU, checkpointing, and another record breaking cactus (22 blocks tall)

Finally, support for multiple GPUs and checkpointing has landed.

? If you have multiple GPUs, the research apps will now make use of all available GPUs.
? We now support Intel GPUs.
? If work is suspended, or your machine is powered off, checkpoints will now ensure work does not start from the beginning.
? You will also notice work estimates are far more accurate.
? You do not need to take any actions to enable these features.
? We are also taking steps to increase the priority of additional results added to workunits after computation errors. This in order to speed up validation of incomplete workunits.
Thank you to Hypprs, nicoboss, DutChen18, BalintCsala, and anyone else who was involved in testing and updating the app.

For the third time in 1 week, Minecraft@Home has broken the tallest cactus height record in normal terrain generation.
I present, a 22 block tall cactus:



1.14.4 world seed: 11343195073417814, co-ordinates: 14955936 64 -3750655.

Congratulations to volunteer SirNapkin1334, your host was responsible for locating this one!

While I have your attention, user profiles are now enabled, please ensure you create a user profile.
This will ensure you can be selected for 'user of the day' which is displayed on the homepage.

Please post any issues on our message boards. Alternatively, for real-time discussion, join our Discord.

2020-07-01: BOINC, Article about WCG on Raspberry Pi

Check out Volunteer your Raspberry Pi to IBM?s World Community Grid, an article in the Raspberry Pi blog.

2020-07-01: MLC@Home, Welcome to MLC@Home

Welcome to MLC@Home, a new BOINC Project

BOINC URL to join: https://www.mlcathome.org/mlcathome/

For an introduction, please see https://www.mlcathome.org/ . I will continue to update that page over the next few days with more information. Please let me know of any issues you have with either the web site or the client. And thank you for your interest.

Here are a few quick bits of information:

Who are we?

We, at the moment, is just me. I'm John Clemens, a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). You can view my Google Scholar profile here: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=kIKFod8AAAAJ&hl=en . You can view my outdated homepage here http://www.deater.net/john. I'm studying ways to extract information from neural networks so we can better understand their uses and limitations. I aim to expand the list of researchers working on this project going forward.

When will Windows be ready

I'm working on it. It shouldn't be more than a week or so before a beta windows client is ready. But I'm a linux developer, so if someone would like to help, please let me know. I'll keep everyone informed of progress.

What happens to the data?
I intend to make all data available for download on the main website. Science dies in darkness.

Thanks again for your interest, now lets get crunching!

2020-06-30: MLC@Home, Still getting things ready

This is a test news post, and a note that this project is still getting ready for prime time.

I'm still in the process of moving the application from my test server to the production one.
Please sit tight.

2020-06-29: MilkyWay@home, New Separation Runs 6/19/2020

Hello Everyone,

I have put up the following separation runs:

de_modfit_80_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_3
de_modfit_81_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_3
de_modfit_82_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_3
de_modfit_83_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_3
de_modfit_84_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_3
de_modfit_85_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_3
de_modfit_86_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_3

And I have taken down the following separation runs:

de_modfit_80_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2
de_modfit_81_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2
de_modfit_82_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2
de_modfit_83_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2
de_modfit_86_bundle4_4s_south4s_bgset_2
de_modfit_14_bundle5_testing_4s3f_1
de_modfit_14_bundle5_testing_4s3f_2
de_modfit_14_bundle5_testing_4s3f_3
de_modfit_14_bundle5_testing_3s4f_1
de_modfit_14_bundle5_testing_3s4f_2
de_modfit_14_bundle5_testing_3s4f_3

The new runs are copies of the previous bgset_2 runs, in order to verify our results. Since the stripe 84 and 85 runs in the last set went a bit wonky after a couple weeks, I expect the same to happen here. I will keep a close watch on these forums, and when people begin to report errors from the runs on those stripes, I will promptly take them down. The errors that people are reporting on the bgset_2 runs should stop in the next couple days as the old runs all finish trickling in.

All of the testing runs have come down (there may be more in the future).

Thank you all for your continued support with this project. Stay safe (and sane) in these strange times.

Best,
Tom

2020-06-28: iThena, [June 28th, 2020] Maintenance interruption in access to the system

Today (June 28th, 2020) evening of the UTC time I plan a relatively short break in the availability of the iThena project.

This break will apply to all services of the iThena project in BOINC.

The break should last about 1-2 hours.

Sorry for the problems!

2020-06-27: Minecraft@Home, Record breaking cactus #2

For the second time this week, we have broken a Minecraft cactus height record!
Host belonging to volunteer 'vcokltfre' located a 21 block tall cactus which was later processed into a valid world seed.

1.14.4 world seed: 7007665385562311, co-ordinates: -20626031 64 17078576.

Congratulations to all for taking part. Here's to 22 and beyond!

2020-06-25: Minecraft@Home, BOINC Project

Many new members have joined from SalC1's announcement and the listing of our project on the BOINC site. We welcome and hope to see all members stick around to see the community's contributions, development, and achievements.

Minecraft@Home is a research project to locate seeds, features, the unknown, and the unseen in the block game, Minecraft.

Minecraft is currently the best-selling video game of all time. Although we have no affiliation with Microsoft, Mojang, or the development of Minecraft itself; this project was born out of necessity. Many members of the community have the desire to push the game, which keeps on giving, to its limits.

The listing of Minecraft@Home allows users to join the project more efficiently. Volunteer compute resources are essential to the success of our research, as some elements require high volumes of computing power in order to retrieve results.

As many may have seen in the latest batch of workunits, we have had a series of errors and issues. We believe these to be mostly ironed out.
BOINC is a learning experience for us all. Grid computing technology is very new to us, so there has, of course, been some teething issues.
We ask the community to bear with us as we perfect our development workflows and move to release more projects and exciting news in the coming weeks.

If you missed our previous announcement regarding the record-breaking cactus Minecraft@Home discovered, visit our Twitter: https://twitter.com/minecraftathome

If you are a BOINC expert, a developer, or otherwise enthusiastic about Minecraft and our project; please join our Discord! https://discord.gg/xVFh9bp

2020-06-25: LHC@Home, Downtime Saturday

The database underlying LHC@home will be down on Saturday 27th of June due to an upgrade of a DB storage rack.

Hence LHC@home BOINC services will be unavailable for a good part of the day. (Est 5:30-12:30 UTC)

So your BOINC client connections to our servers are likely to fail on Saturday.

Thanks and happy crunching!

2020-06-24: BOINC, Minecraft@Home launched

Minecraft@Home studies questions related to Minecraft, such as the properties of worlds that can be generated from different random seeds.

2020-06-23: RakeSearch, Thank you for R10 search!

Dear participants, a partial search R10 is over and we have placed links to its results on About RakeSearch page.

Also, we want to say great thank you to all the project participants! To everyone who returned at least one correct result, we gave out a special badge with a bumblebee - as one of the symbols of distributed computing, when everyone is doing something themselves, helping the common cause.

Is this the final? May be not! Who knows?

P.S. And some statistics! Project performance during R10 search expressed in CPU time (in days) per day or number of active threads!

2020-06-21: PrimeGrid, GFN-524288 Find!

On 29 May 2020, 07:52:25 UTC, PrimeGrid's Generalized Fermat Prime Search found the Mega Prime:

3638450^524288+1

The prime is 3,439,810 digits long and enters Chris Caldwell's The Largest Known Primes Database ranked 3rd for Generalized Fermat primes and 35th overall.

The discovery was made by Wolfgang Schwieger (DeleteNull)of Germany using a GeForce RTX 2070 in an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor with 16GB RAM, running Linux openSUSE . This GPU took about 31 minutes to complete the probable prime (PRP) test using GeneferOCL5. Wolfgang Schwieger is a member of the SETI.Germany Team.

The PRP was verified on 29 May 2020, 08:23:51 UTC by Greg Miller (Olgar) of the United States using a gfx1010 in an AMD FX-8370 Eight-Core Processor with 16GB RAM, running Microsoft Windows 10 Professional x64 Edition. This computer took about 1 hour, 3 minutes to complete the probable prime (PRP) test using GeneferOCL5. Greg Miller is a member of the USA Team.

The PRP was confirmed prime by an Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1240 v6 @ 3.70GHz with 4GB RAM, running Linux Debian . This computer took about 1 day, 19 hours, 22 minutes to complete the primality test using LLR.

For more details, please see the official announcement.

2020-06-21: Minecraft@Home, We are live

The beta period has ended! We are happy with the progress so far, thanks to all who contributed during this phase of the project.

We have now pushed over 1.2 million work units for processing as part of the cactus finding project.
This is following the success of locating world seeds for cactuses up to 21 blocks tall, 2 blocks higher than the existing record.

You may notice a new application, panorama; this is attempting to locate the world seed which was used for the panorama screenshot used in the Minecraft main menu.

There are plenty more applications and work units to come. Thank you all once again for taking part in this adventure.

2020-06-19: T.Brada Experimental Grid, Badges

New badges for the SPT sub-project! The Prime Tuples subproject fully covered the missing range from Stop@Home and also scanned for new kind of tuples (tpt, stpt, gaps) up to the same range. As a Thank You to all contributors, I present you four new badges. The badges are awarded based on credit earned on the SPT app (ids 10,11), not RAC and the credit level have been chosen based on current credit distribution. The results of the project are slowly being submitted to OEIS. If you do not have a badge, do not worry, there will be more tasks, searching for rarer and longer sequences.

2020-06-19: WEP-M+2 Project, 12-digit factor of P2203 has now been found by the project...

...245973 times

2020-06-17: SRBase, base S443 Megaprime

On 26th of May, CharityEngine1, a member of the team Gridcoin has found a Megaprime 166*443^432000+1 for base S443. The prime has 1.143.249 digits and entered the TOP5000 in Chris Caldwell's The Largest Known Primes Database.

2020-06-17: NumberFields@home, Should the fixed credits be higher?

I have had a couple people mention that the fixed credits should be higher. I tried to set the credits to be in line with the cobblestone definition, but it's possible I missed the mark.

I will wait for feedback before making any changes. Please share your credit opinions.

2020-06-17: World Community Grid, This is how a global community unites to find cancer biomarkers.

Sawyer created a World Community Grid team to help accelerate research after his father was diagnosed with brain cancer. In the process, he found a global community of volunteers who are helping scientists at Krembil Research Institute find cancer biomarkers, which could lead to better diagnosis and treatment.

2020-06-16: BOINC, SUNET client released

SUNET has released a BOINC client that simplifies participation. Learn more here.

2020-06-15: Minecraft@Home, Beta testing now live

The Minecraft@Home server is now open for beta-testing.

Kaktwoos is the first application in test with several thousand work units available for processing.
Currently, this application only supports Windows 64-bit clients with an Nvidia GPU, this will be expanded to cover the majority of other platforms soon.

Kaktwoos uses chunk seed generation to find cactus stacks of 20 blocks or higher by locating neighbouring chunk seeds which overlap with the input chunk seed.
Cactus stacks generate when two overlapping chunk seeds generate a cactus on the same x, y coordinate.
The input seeds for Kaktwoos were generated by scanning all 281.7 trillion possible chunk seeds for cactuses of 10 blocks or higher. This yielded 42,497 seeds which were algorithmically reduced to a smaller sample (used as the input for Kaktwoos) by scoring each for the likeliness to collide with another cactus.

During beta testing, any issued credits will be cleared as the beta period ends, this is to ensure fairness once we are out of beta-testing.
Any work unit time estimates are inaccurate as we have not specified the number of floating-point operations required for work unit runtime during this stage of testing.

Computation errors during this stage are expected and should be ignored. We kindly ask you to leave your clients running for as long as possible whenever idle to allow us to take full advantage of this beta test.

2020-06-11: World Community Grid, Help Stop TB Researchers Welcome New Team Member

Meet the newest member of the Help Stop TB research team, who will be helping with the project?s data analysis.

2020-06-08: MilkyWay@home, New Runs for MilkyWay@home Nbody Simulations (06/08/2020)

Hey everyone,

We realized that the comparison histogram in the last set of runs contained incorrect data. As such we have replaced the last set of runs on 05/30/2020 with the following runs in their place:
-de_nbody_06_08_2020_v176_40k__data__1
-de_nbody_06_08_2020_v176_40k__data__2
-de_nbody_06_08_2020_v176_40k__data__3

We apologize for any inconvenience,

-Eric

2020-06-08: MindModeling@Home, Hello, all!

Good morning!

As I take over for Josh, please bear with me. I am aware there are currently some issues out there. I will do my best to to support you all and this project.

I look forward to working with you all.

Best,
Olivia

2020-06-08: SETI@Home, Nebula-related news

Read the latest installment of the Nebula blog: Observations on observation.

2020-06-06: RakeSearch, May 2020 totals!

Dear folks, we close to completing the search!

In the last days of May the last portion of workunits were generated and most of them completed at now. After completion of all tasks we will summarize the search results but now - the last totals of the month! Computers of 168 participants found pairs with high degree of orthogonality and our warm congratulations to:

[AF>Amis de la Mer] ComteZera (L'Alliance Francophone) and pi,
KWSN-SpongeBob SquarePants (The Knights Who Say Ni!) and rz,
[AF>Amis des Lapins] Ceclo (L'Alliance Francophone) and d7s,
[AF>Libristes]MortelKni (L'Alliance Francophone) and Ron,
Byron Leigh Hatch @ team Carl Sagan (Carl Sagan) and john,
[AF>Libristes]cguillem (L'Alliance Francophone) and joel,
[AF>Libristes] Elorak (L'Alliance Francophone) and KySU,
Brian Minear (University of Colorado, Boulder) and Mite,
????????????? ???? ?????????? ????? (Karelia) and ladmo,
[AF>HFR>MPT]vortex31 (L'Alliance Francophone) and jorio,
Karelian Center for Gender Studies (Karelia) and ccpmc,
?????? ?????????? ???????????-?????????? and cbc22,
darclaw (Sorry for Grand Ol' Partying) and Geoff,
[AF>EDLS]zOU (L'Alliance Francophone) and i ball,
[VENETO]francesco.nandi (BOINC.Italy) and AxiomD,
Technik007[CZ] (Czech National Team) and kraDen,
UBT - Chris Suddick (UK BOINC Team) and Igor G,
LeChat51X (L'Alliance Francophone) and Skyfli,
Duce H_K_ (L'Alliance Francophone) and yippee,
Steve Dodd (The Planetary Society) and Heikki,
Ian (NapierNimbus) (UK BOINC Team) and Dakkar,
Rhodan71 (L'Alliance Francophone) and arkiss,
Thyler Durden@P3D (Planet 3DNow!) and manfred,
Alexander Mor

2020-06-05: MindModeling@Home, Goodbye and thanks for all the fish!

Hello,

Today is my last day working on MindModeling. Taking over as primary devop is Olivia, who has worked with me for the past year. This won't affect day to day operations, beyond who is responding to you all and who is working behind the scenes.

I know we are currently having several issues -- with Lisp jobs on Windows in particular -- that I feel bad for leaving to her, but I know the site is in good hands. Please be patient with her when there are issues. It's a thankless job keeping the lights on, and work moving through the system. :P

Happy crunching!
Josh

2020-06-02: World Community Grid, Planned Maintenance on Thursday, June 4, 2020 (Completed)

We are updating the operating system on our servers on Thursday, June 4, beginning at 13:00 UTC.

2020-06-02: World Community Grid, Planned Maintenance on Thursday, June 4, 2020

We are updating the operating system on our servers on Thursday, June 4, beginning at 13:00 UTC.