The Official BOINC news thread

BOINC v3.03 and SAH v3.03 for all platforms has been released to the alpha test. This will be released to the beta test soon.

BOINC v3.04 has been tagged for alpha test release.

BOINC v3.04 has been released on all platforms to the alpha test. This fixes the abnormal termination cases on Unix and Windows.

OUTAGE WARNING: On Monday, May 17th there will be a 2 hour outage starting at 17:00 UTC. The BOINC site and all BOINC servers will be off-line during this time.

There was a scheduled outage for about 4 hours this morning for hardware upgrades. The website and all BOINC servers are all back online. Now for some great news. Here's a hint first: time to start crunching seti@home workunits like never before.

We are approaching end game for the M1 milestone. Future versions of BOINC and the SAH application will be release builds until we have nailed the public launch release. For those that are concerned about the quality of the build, after we have nailed the public launch release we will be including even more diagnostics code into the builds after the public launch release and be pumping in real work-units into the alpha project.The extra debug code we are going to implement will tack on another 30% to the execution time of the current debug build. Basically every new/delete/malloc/free call will check the debug heap for corruption. We will track down these crashes and get them fixed.

There are no showstoppers for beta. If nobody reports a showstopper, then tomorrow BOINC and SAH v3.04 will release to Beta. After that, a new version of BOINC and SAH will be posted to Alpha. These will be release builds (certain pieces of debug code will be removed so performance will be the same if not better than SAH v1), then the push for a build that can release as a public launch candidate. There will be a 3 or 4 day turn around for beta deployment. If you know of any bugs that we shouldn't release with the public launch release, please email Rom Walton or mention it in the Alpha/Beta forums.

Tag for 3.05 release, all platforms boinc_core_release_3_05

BOINC v3.04 and SAH v3.03 have been released to beta for all platforms. BOINC v3.05 and SAH v3.05 have been released to alpha for all platforms. Please upgrade to BOINC v3.04 if you're in the beta test.

BOINC v3.05 and SAH v3.05 have been released to beta for all platforms. This is the first release where the Windows build is a release build. v3.06 will be switched back to a debug build as the developers think they can track down a few more issues before launch. There will be more release builds before launch.

Running BOINC v3.05 and it works great. Without some or all of the debug code in it, it works just as fast as seti@home commandline. BOINC v3.06 will contain a new benchmarking scheme. There's a good chance that BOINC will release within a month or so.

The two machine I have running BOINC are both upgraded to 3.05. Where they used to take 5-7 hours, they have complete units in 1.5-2 hours. That's good news indeed.

OK I have been having problems, It says now work available!!! I also can not figure out how to change my disk size.
Any help?

Make sure you're using the latest version which is v3.05. Try uninstalling it and reinstalling it.

Originally posted by xn
Make sure you're using the latest version which is v3.05. Try uninstalling it and reinstalling it.

Did that 8 times......

Originally posted by TrickmastertricK
OK I have been having problems, It says now work available!!! I also can not figure out how to change my disk size.
Any help?

xn will correct me if I am giving any bad info, but here is my take. I had the "no work" error when I let my version get too far behind. You can always un-install what you have and re-install the newest (3.05) version. You'll need the project URL and account ID for your BOINC account to re-attach to the project.

The BOINC Beta Test URL is setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu...

To set your preferences, like system resources, log onto your BOINC Beta Test Account Page

[edit] speed kills, sorry - slow typist at work

[Edited on 22-5-2004 by Spectre]

looks correct. setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu...

wow, I wanted to test BOINC, so I switched to it from Seti@home temporary and I've finished 21% of a workunit in 15 mins.

Yeah I did all this,

Astropulse Beta - 2004-05-22 01:28:41 - Message from server: No work available (there was work but you don't have enough disk space allocated)
Astropulse Beta - 2004-05-22 01:28:41 - No work from project
--- - 2004-05-22 09:15:23 - Fewer active results than CPUs; requesting more work
Astropulse Beta - 2004-05-22 09:15:26 - Deferring communication with project for 1 hours, 24 minutes, and 10 seconds


WTF????

How do I allocate more disk space?
If I reset it, will I lose all my previous Work?

Originally posted by TrickmastertricK
How do I allocate more disk space?
If I reset it, will I lose all my previous Work?

Did you login to the webpage and check the "general prefs" > "edit prefs" section? I think that is where disk space requirements are set out. Mine are:

Use no more than - 10 Gbytes
Leave at least - 0.1 Gbytes free
Use no more than - 50% of total space

Mine only taking about 8MB of space, total. How much free space do you have on the drive where BOINC is running?

If you have adjusted it and saved the settings, the next time your clients polls the server it should pick up the new settings. My dialog looks like this:
--- - 2004-05-22 14:33:55 - General prefs: from Astropulse Beta (last modified 2004-03-05 01:31:29)
--- - 2004-05-22 14:33:55 - General prefs: no separate prefs for home; using your defaults

I don't know about losing work you have already done, but I doubt it. I have monkies around with my dozens of times, re-installed, etc.. and never lost any credit.

Anyone who has visited the BOINC Beta Test forums will notice that it's been reorganized. This is another sign that launch is very near. So far BOINC has been running good for me, just some minor bugs. All I know about the release date is it won't be this month. It will most likely be in June sometime, the Seti@home servers decommissioned in late summer or early fall. This is just my estimate and could still change. Once BOINC releases, I will close this thread and create a new one that will track down remaining issues in BOINC that need to be fixed before Seti@home is decommissioned and other important info.

I just upgraded to the latest version and it works great. Does the work in less than half the time it did before. And no weird error msgs.

One question:
What exactly is benchmarking?