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bcavnaugh
Crunching@EVGA The Number One Team in the BOINC Community. Folding@EVGA The Number One Team in the Folding@Home Community. Crunching@EVGA The...

Xoroshigo2 v1.06 - MacOS
Hi everyone,

We've added some new binaries for this project to allow macs to run.
Both x86 and ARM64 based macs should run just fine.

The linux and windows binaries remain at v1.05, there'd be nothing new for them if we did bump them to 1.06.
Macos is on 1.06 because I uncovered a bug in my deployment of the macos binaries and had to use a version bump to replace the old version.

Anyway, something interesting I've discovered is that M1 (and really, all apple silicon so far) LOVES these tasks.

On a sample mini task, I got 120 seconds on my 12700k, and 61 seconds on my M1 macbook air.
On the same sample mini task, one of our project developers tried it on their M4 Pro and got 43 seconds.
Of course, that's not perfectly reflective of runtimes, but I expect to see apple silicon based machines top the charts for this app based on these preliminary results.

Happy crunching, everyone!
23 Apr 2025, 23:49:47 UTC · Discuss

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New Badges
Hi everyone,

I've added the following new badges while I was doing some database work today.

1. 1.21 Panorama badge. It's a copper bulb block from Minecraft, which is a block found in Trial Chambers. The pano121 app attempted to find a seed which produces a particular trial chamber matching the one found in the title screen panorama for 1.21.
2. Xoroshigo v1.0. This art was created largely by the lead developer of the xoroshigo project, but I added the "alpha" symbol at the bottom right to represent that it was the first run of the app before optimizations were made.
3. Xoroshigo v1.1. Same art as v1.0, but without the alpha symbol.
4. Xoroshigo Infinity. Same art as v1.0 and v1.1, but with an infinity symbol. I attempted to identify everyone who submitted a task after deadline during the time we had a broken version of the app running that caused runtimes measuring in multiple days for some configurations. If you believe I missed you in error, please let me know. We're in the middle of optimizing the amount of data we're storing in our database, so I may need to review previous versions of the data to ensure I don't miss anybody.

I also managed to re-run the badge assignment for the tall cactus project from years ago. Around 2300 or so participants gained the badge, congratulations!
The discrepancy was likely caused by the method that the previous administrator before me used to apply the badge. Since it did not use a sql clause, it likely used a "snapshot" of data without keeping it updated.

All that said, I will probably also add a loneliest seed badge tonight before I wrap up, but I'll update here if I do.

Thanks for your patience as we've been working diligently to get things running smoothly here.
21 Apr 2025, 6:22:16 UTC · Discuss

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Xoroshigo2 v1.05 - Runtime fix
Hi everyone,

I appreciate your patience while we worked through this.

v1.05 addresses the extreme runtime issues we've been facing lately.

I would recommend cancelling any v1.04 tasks that are running too long.

I'm looking into ways we can credit those who attempted to run broken v1.04 tasks, but as far as I can tell, boinc does not support that scenario. So I don't have an answer quite yet.

I'm deploying some more tasks worth 10,000 credits each as a consolation for this.

Please let me know if you run into any issues.
18 Apr 2025, 21:45:46 UTC · Discuss

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Xoroshigo2 v1.04 - New plan classes
Hello everyone,

We've generated some new work, and while I was at it, I implemented the plan class changes I alluded to in discussion with a few users who were trying to use Windows 7 to run xoroshigo.

Python does not support Windows 7 anymore, hasn't since Python 3.8 back in 2018. 3.9 made breaking changes for Windows 7 and will not run on Windows 7.

To remedy the issue, we've implemented "win-modern" and "lin-modern" as plan classes we can use if our apps won't run on older OSes.

Put simply, on linux if your GLIBC is older than 2.27, you won't get work for xoroshigo2 (or any other app that requires lin-modern - which is likely to be all of our work in the future.)
On Windows, your windows version must be 8.1 or higher.

Let us know if you run into any issues running our apps. Happy crunching!
13 Apr 2025, 1:15:04 UTC · Discuss

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Xoroshiro128++ - New version available, new input data
Hi everyone,

As I'm sure was noticed, there's a 2nd version of the "xoroshigo" project denoted by v1.1.
This new version has had changes made to its input variables that made it incompatible with the old version, so we could not run it as an updated version of the same app.

That being said, after extensive testing, we've deployed v1.02 of xoroshigo2(or v1.1.1.02, depending on who you ask) to production.
I believe there should also be a potential fix for the issue where work would not suspend when changes are made to computing preferences or work is just simply suspended.

The most notable change is that a member of our team, Andrew, developed a port of one of the most expensive functions (95+% of execution time spent in this function) used in the app to run it as native code for a 20x speedup.
We've cranked the dials, so tasks should be roughly the same size as before, but you may experience runtime variances compared to before. Overall this just means you're completing 20x what you used to in the same amount of time (cheaper on compute resources) - so the credit values are remaining the same.

There is also now an aarch64 build of this app available. We've made best efforts to test this with our limited aarch64 machines, so if any issues are encountered, please let us know.

Finally, I wanted to mention that as of now, we're enforcing a GLIBC 2.17 or above requirement for our apps going forward. I've built a lot of CI test harnesses over the last day or two that allow me to detect issues before they ever hit BOINC, and while I had been doing this already, there is now a check on our internal repo preventing any merges with binaries with a GLIBC over 2.17. This does also mean you'll need GLIBC 2.17 or higher to run the apps we build going forward.

Anyway, happy crunching! As always, please let us know if you run into any issues.
4 Apr 2025, 7:46:02 UTC · Discuss

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